Interview with Rodney Foil

CHARM Oral History Project Interview of: Dr. Rodney Foil June 18, 2002 and June 25, 2002 Interviewer: Dr. Michael Ballard Location: Stennis Montgomery Room, Mitchell Memorial Library Mississippi State University campus Dr. Michael Ballard: Ok, we will just start with part one of this format we are using and just give us, for the sake of the record, your background: where you were born, who you married, how many kids you got, we will just do the personal section in any order that you want to do it. Dr. Rodney Foil: Ok. My name is Rodney Foil. Officially by the army and others, Robert Rodney Foil. Currently live in Starkville, and have lived here since 1969. Married with two children-- son, who is fortytwo, and a daughter who is forty. Both live out of state. I started out as a very very na�ve college student at LSU in 1952. Came from a middle-class family, and only one member of the remote family had ever gone to college. My dad's youngest brother had gone to LSU and majored in Forestry, so I did. I really didn't know that there were other things that they taught there at the time (laughter). But, I got a bachelors in Forestry in 1956, Masters in Forestry in 1960, and a doctorate in Forestry at Duke in 1965. At the completion of my bachelor's degree, I was drafted, served two years in the army during the Cold War. There really wasn't a whole lot going on in the army. But, I did serve in Texas and Alaska. I got an early out from the Army to come back and get a Masters degree. Had it not been for the opportunity to leave the army a little bit early, I would have probably gone back to being an industrial forester in Georgia, which was what I was doing when I was drafted. At any rate, after completing a Masters, I found that I could make more money with educational institutions than I could with industry at that particular time, so I went to work for LSU at an off campus research station in north Louisiana: The North Louisiana Hill Farm Experiment Station, which I joined at the instructors level in 1960. Stayed there until 1967, with a year off on sabbatical to get a doctorate at Duke. In 1967, I left the research arena and went to Baton Rouge main campus to become a statewide extensions specialist in forestry. Maintained that job for a couple of years, then was offered the opportunity to come here to
Mississippi State as department head in the Department of Forestry. I came in October 1969. The reasons for coming to Mississippi State were interesting. Of course, like most people, it was a chance to make more money, and I had two young children at the time, preschool. I think one in the first grade. The princely salary of $12,000 a year, was offered to me to come here as a department head, which was a few thousand dollars more than I was making where I was as I recall. So that was the primary thing. Of course, it was a considerable promotion to come here as department head. Interestingly enough, even though I grew up in an adjoining state, I had never been on the Mississippi State campus until I came here for an interview. I was immediately struck by the very friendly campus, the high importance that the administration placed on the position that I was going to be taking. I was interviewed by the then president Bill Giles. I had worked at LSU for ten year, eleven years without every having met the president of LSU. MB: RF: That impressed you right away? Impressed me a lot. As a sideline, just to show you how university governance has changed, I came here and had dinner with the then Dean of the School of Forestry, Bob Klap. Then, the next morning, began my interview schedule. I interviewed with Dr. Jim Anderson, who was director of the experiment station; Dr. Louis Wise, who was Vice-President for Agriculture and Forestry; Dr. John Bettersworth, who was Vice-President for Academic Affairs; and Dr. Bill Giles, who was president. At three o'clock that afternoon, Dean Klap offered me the job. I did not meet a single faculty member (laughter) in the department that I was to be the head of. Although, I had met some of them previously. The interview process was a much more direct process in those days than it is today. Well, I think we got up to where you had been offered a job here at Mississippi State. Obviously, you accepted it. I did and never regretted it. Mississippi State and the state of Mississippi has been very very good to me. Could we talk a little bit about the Department of Forestry when you came here? How developed it was then and how it evolved under your leadership? Well, that is interesting and something that I very proud of. The history of forestry education and research here at Mississippi State
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is interesting because it mirrors an educational philosophy that this state has had and still has to some degree. Forests have been important in the economy and the life of Mississippians from the beginning. It's a forested state and has always been influenced greatly by forest industry and the people use the forest a lot. During the early years of scientific forestry in the United States, much of the research was done in Mississippi. The US Forest Service was active here. They had an experiment station in New Orleans that did most of its fieldwork in Mississippi. But, there was no Forestry School here. LSU started a professional forestry school in 1926. Through my time there in the early 50s, half the student body was from Mississippi. Yet, the state of Mississippi said we can't afford to have a forestry school. We will let Mississippians come to community college or Mississippi State for two years, and then the can transfer and go get a forestry degree somewhere else. That continued until 1954 when through pressure from the legislature actually, Mississippi State decided to create a four-year forestry program here. It's a ________ story, but I tend to believe it. The people in forestry who brought this change about succeeded because they told...err, got the legislature to say, that if Mississippi State does not put in a forestry school, we are going to authorize one at Southern. All of a sudden, Mississippi State decided they wanted a forestry school (laughter). That is a lot... MB: RF: That's believable. That is about what happens in Mississippi education, but at any rate, the first professional graduate from the forestry program was in 1956, which was the same year the I graduated from LSU in a class of thirty, fifteen of whom were from Mississippi. At the onset, and it was pretty hardscrabble. It was hard to find the money to really have a professional forestry school. Bob Klap was the founding dean. We had actually a Department of Forestry in the College of Agriculture. Then in 1961, couple of things happened that were of great significance. One, is that Dean Colvard came here as president of Mississippi State. He came from North Carolina State, where he had been Dean of the College of Agriculture. North Carolina State had a very very outstanding forestry program. He was supporting in that. He hired, as his Vice-President for Agriculture and Forestry, Bill Giles, who had been superintendent of the Stoneville Branch Experiment Station in Stoneville, and had as one of his closest closest friends, an individual named J.S. "Sid" McKnight, who was a research forester with the US Forest Service at Stoneville. Sid and his colleagues in forestry in the delta had convinced Dr. Giles of the importance of forestry. Dr. Giles was originally trained as a
botanist before he becomes an agronomist and he liked the outdoors. At any rate, in 61, they began to commit to really building a forestry program. They created a School of Forestry in 66 with the transfer of the Wildlife Program from the Department of Zoology to the new School of Forestry. That transfer consisted of transferring one individual and two graduate students, Dr. Dale Arner? who had been a professor of zoology became head of the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. They created a department from the Forest Products Utilization Laboratory that had been created in 1964. Dr. Warren Thompson had been hired to head this research organization and was just getting it started. The buildings were being completed when I cam in 69. So, the pieces were in place when I came here. We had the three departments created. The Forestry Department, which was the founding department, had twelve faculty members when I came--twelve professors. Wildlife and Fisheries, by then, had grown to two. Forest Products had three perhaps four faculty level people. But, some things had happened that really convinced me very early on that the future was quite bright. One is that in 1962, the Congress of the United States passed the McEntire-Stennis Forestry Research Act, which resulted in money being transferred to the states in 1964, but was earmarked and required to be spent on forest resources research. That resulted the beginning allocation to Mississippi was something like $50,000 out of a million and a half dollars nationally. But, it was enough to get the attention of the policymakers. It was enough to hire a professor, perhaps two at the time. It gave an impetus in the state legislature to really call into play the power of the forest interests in the state. So, beginning in 69, we were able to just ride a wave of public interest and economic understanding because the pulp and paper industry began to expand in Mississippi at the time. Weyerhaeuser Company came to the state. There were just a number of things that happened in the 70s that allowed us to develop. One of things that was asked in the questionnaire was what are some of my career highlights. One of those was that in 1976, when the Society of American Foresters came here to review us for accreditation. They had come in 1971, when I was very new here. They gave us provisional accreditation. One of the comments that they made that they considered negative was that the forestry program at Mississippi State was too responsive to the needs of Mississippi and the Mississippi forest industry (laughter). But, we did not take into account the _______ world and that we were not very cosmopolitan. I took that to be a great compliment. MB: I would think so.
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Yet, we did...that meant they came back in five years. During that five-year period, we were successful in getting some appropriations from the legislature to expand the faculty, to expand the scope. Enrollment increased probably by a factor of doubling during that period. We got full unconditional accreditation in 1976. It was...the report was held in the president's conference room in Allen Hall. I remember when we walked out of there, Louis Wise, the Vice-President said he truly wished that Dr. Giles had been there to hear this because he had heard all the things that said we can's afford a good forestry school in Mississippi, therefore we should not have one (laughter). So, there has been a great change. Twelve faculty members when I came, six of those had the doctorate, six did not. The focus was entirely at the undergraduate level, they had given one Masters degree. Of course now, they have a very very well developed PhD program, very very well developed research program and perhaps equally important, they have got a very very broad subject matter coverage. Not just timber production forestry, which is still very very important, but a lot of environmental aspects, and the Wildlife and Fisheries' aspect. The Mississippi catfish industry came along in the 80s and built the fisheries portion of the Wildlife and Fisheries Department tremendously. So, the thirty years that I have been associated, even though I left the Forestry end of things in 1978, have been exciting to observe. There has been a lot of growth and a lot of positive things happen. You mentioned that they considered it a criticism that you were responsive to the state. How did...exactly how did the Forestry Department interact with tree farmers and industry in the state? I mean you do not have to get into complete detail, but what kind of programs you have? Did you meet with them periodically? How did that work? Well, there are a lot of fortunate things about it. The forestry community in Mississippi has been a very unified community during my time here in great contrast to the adjoining state of Louisiana. Where in Louisiana, the forest industry exists as one category, and the forest landowners exist as another category and they do not talk to each other. They have an antagonist thing and you have one organization for industry and another organization for private citizens. In Mississippi, there has been a great leadership factor in all segments--public and private pull together. The forestry faculty at Mississippi State has served leadership roles in that consortium of common interest. The Dean of Forestry School serves, by law, on the State Forestry Commission, which has got the state agencies, fire protection, and all of the regulatory
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activities as their responsibility. The State Forestry Association has the Dean, the Department Head, and the Vice-President ex officio members of their boards. The Professional Foresters in the state are probably eighty percent graduates of Mississippi State now, and they invite the faculty and the students for field trips and things of that nature. There are now in this state, county forestry associations in sixty-two of the counties I believe, and all of those are receiving leadership from the cooperative extension service from Mississippi State, which means that the forestry specialists and the extensions service, as well as, the forestry faculty are called on to come to the county forestry meetings and give talks and...So, it's a very close knit community. Not as close as it used to be. The world has changed now, but during the early years, there was a leadership group of twenty-five people perhaps, two or three of which would be from Mississippi State, that would be involved in positive public action that was taken--usually with a representative or two from the legislature. The supervisor of the US Forest Service national forests in this state, the state forester, and the chief forester for International Paper Company, Anderson Tully in the delta, and two or three others. MB: RF: Well, lets move on. You changed jobs in 1978, so lets talk about your new position. Right, just to fill in the gaps, I was department head in Forestry from 69 until 71. 71 to 73, I was associate dean and department head. Dean Klap was getting up in years, and he had lost his wife during that time and so, I was moved into the associate deans job and in many ways did a lot of the travel and things that Dean Klap could not do, or did not want to do. I became dean on his retirement in 1973. So, 73 to 78, I was dean of the Forestry School, which meant that the three departments, Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries, and Forest Products reported to me. During that time, I also served as Associate Director of the Agriculture and Forestry Experiment Station, now known as MAFES. Much to my surprise, in 1978, I was chosen to be director of the experiment station. It was surprising because at that time, there had only been one forester who had actually served as director as an agricultural experiment station and he got fired after the first nine months (laughter). There is not a whole lot of common ground between people in forestry and people in row crop agriculture. So, there were many who felt that a forester could not manage an experiment station, an agricultural experiment station. The same people who felt that an agriculturist certainly could manage a forestry program.
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Yeah, sure (laughs). But, at any rate, I became director of the experiment station in 1978 and was director of that unit from 78 to 86. Of course, one reason that I was able to do that, and I think reasonably successfully, was that the early seven years of my career were on a branch experiment station in Louisiana, where I was doing forestry research, but we also did beef cattle research, dairy cattle research, ag economics research, and ag crop research. With a seven person staff, seven scientist staff, you learned what everybody was doing. I learned the vocabulary of agriculture that made it possible for me to move in and at least get over the first hurdle in talking with pure agriculture people. I still have to give a great deal of credit to Louis Wise who had the courage to choose me. Because there were a lot of people on this campus who said that a forester just cannot do that job. Once again, times have changed. There was no search committee. There was no interviews. As a matter of fact, I was on a trip to North Carolina and came home and had a note to see Dr. Wise first thing in morning. I walked across the street from Dorman Hall to Lloyd Ricks, I ran into Walter Porter, who was associate director of the station, who said `congratulations, would you like my letter of resignation?' I said what do you mean? He says, `well you are the director and you out to chose your associate directors and I want you to know that I will resign if you want me to' (laughter). I said I don't even know that I am director, and I am sure not so stupid that I would want you to resign. But, that was the kind of man Walter Porter was. At any rate, I was able to serve as director of the experiment station from 78 to 86. It was some of the best of times and some of the worst of times. We suffered a lot of budget cuts beginning in 1981. We had to so a lot of different things. Some, I think good, some not at all good. At any rate in 1986, Dr. Wise retired and I replaced him as Vice-President for the Division of Agriculture, Forestry, and Veterinary Medicine, which included the Experiment Station, the Extension Service, the then, College of Forestry Resources, the College of Agriculture, and the College of Veterinarian Medicine. I was fortunate to hold that job until June of 1999, when I took retirement and left others to do it. At the time that I moved into that Vice-Presidency, I cannot think of a more humbling experiences, because there had been only two people that held that job prior to me. One was William L. Giles, who was one of the most outstanding individuals that I have ever known. The other was Louis Wise, who equally was outstanding. So, I had some big shoes to fill, and got to participate in a lot of important and interesting things.
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One thing that I think I would like for you to do...I think a lot of people in this state just don't appreciate or maybe just don't know how MAFES operates. You have obviously, the central location is here on campus, but you do have the branches out there. Why don't you just talk about how that whole network functions. Where the different stations are and how it operates. That's a very very good point Mike. It's amazing how many people on this very campus don't understand that the experiment station and the extension service make Mississippi State a statewide institution. In reality, both those organizations probably expend more of their resources off campus than they do on campus. They were not created...I will talk interchangeably about MAFES and MSU Extension. Although the experiment station was the first created. In 1888, the state of Mississippi accepted the provisions of the Hatch Act, which was a Federal deal that provided payments to the states to create agricultural research stations. Interestingly enough, the original author of that bill, the Hatch Act, was Senator George from Mississippi. He introduced it into the Congress in 1870-something. It did not get very far. Then Congressman Hatch from Iowa, I believe, finally got it passed. But, at any rate, it created at the land-grant institution Mississippi State, then ten years old, a federally supported experiment station to do fundamental research into agriculture--problems of the rural areas of the state. The state legislature had to accept that mission by passing a law creating the station. They had to appropriate matching money. So, here was the ten year old Mississippi State College actually, Mississippi A & M, that had to absorb and figure out how to deal with an almost autonomous organization. In the early days, it was pretty much autonomous. The director of the experiment station reported to the president, but they were more or less equals in a lot of ways because the director had money that could only be spent for agricultural research. The president could not use it for anything else. There have been conflicts over that provision from the very beginning. Not at this location, but others. At any rate, this had evolved into what now exists, which is a statewide network. In MAFES, there are ten legislatively created branch experiment stations. Each of which has a statute that says there shall be an experiment station at Crystal Springs to do this that and the other. Many of those...well, lets see. Four of them were created in 1901, and those were almost regional kinds of stations: Holly Springs, Stoneville, Poplarville, and I guess the Macon station...Brooksville were in 1901. At any rate, I may be wrong on that. They operated with those locations until right after World War II, when the Rockefeller Foundation funded a national study, and actually put Rockefeller Foundation money up to assist
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states in creating addition experiment stations. So, six stations were created with Rockefeller funding. They all had the same kind of office buildings. You can still go visit them. They are located in the...well through a compromise of science and politics, they were located where the politicians wanted them to be but in most cases, the universities selected the soil type and the region that would be represented. They represented agriculture of the date that beef cattle at the brown loam in Raymond, cotton at the delta, and things of that nature. In 1914, the Federal government again, passed the Smith-Lever Act, which authorized the land-grant schools to establish county extension programs. The university college had employees created in every county of the state to take the results of the research at the experiment stations and get them applied to the people living on the land. You got to realize that at that time, and really up until World War II, virtually all the people in Mississippi lived in the rural areas and lived on farms. There just were no cities to amount to much. The cities were basically there to process and market the products that came from the farm. Beginning...what eighty-five years ago, I guess, the university here, or college, had a network of employees that covered concentrations at ten branch experiment stations and location in all eighty-two counties. Employees that were charged with agriculture research oriented education, family research or education through the home economics program of the extensions service and youth work, through the 4-H clubs that had been created. The 4-H clubs are celebrating their centennial this year. As a matter of fact, it was celebrated on this campus last week I believe. At any rate, things have changed. The countryside is different. What Mississippi State now has, and one thing that I have got listed as being particularly pleased with and proud of is that we began, along about 1986-87 to consolidate our off-campus activities into four regional research and extension centers. We had one already established at Stoneville in the delta. It was regional from the beginning. There never was another experiment station in the delta. It serves the eighteen delta counties. We created the North Mississippi Extension Center at Verona, just south of Tupelo. We had had a branch extension service there. We got funding from the state for a new facility. We have concentrated our resources, our human resources, there. We still have the branch experiment stations at Pontotoc, and Holly Springs, and Prairie, but we don't have resident scientists at every one of them. We try to concentrate our scientific resources in one location. Le them travel to the branch stations and to other locations to do their research. We followed the North Mississippi Research and Extension Center with the Central Mississippi Research and Extension Center on the campus of Hinds
Community College. That building was completed about two years ago. That provides leadership for the central part of the state, and includes our Coastal Plains Branch Station at Newton, the Crystal Springs Truck Crops Experiment Station, the Brown Loam Station at Raymond. In addition, our land-grant partner at Alcorn State University is very directly involved in the Central Mississippi Research and Extension Center. In 1971, the legislature had created a branch of our experiment station at Alcorn, and provided money to support the hiring of Alcorn State faculty members as researchers in the Mississippi State Extension Service... I mean Research Station and Extension Service actually. That worked very very well up until the late 80s, early 90s when Alcorn had grown its program to the point that they did not want to be a branch of anybody. They asked for separation and we concurred and the legislature created a program at Alcorn. Since central Mississippi includes Alcorn, they participate in the Central Mississippi Research and Extension Service programs at Hinds. We are starting construction...I think they have already started construction, have the money for the South Mississippi Research and Extension Center. It's called the Coastal Research and Extension Center, and will be at Biloxi. It will be the administrative focus for the research program at Richton Mississippi and at Poplarville Mississippi, as well as, a concentration of researchers down on the coast that are comprised of the sea grant researchers of Mississippi State, as well as the land-grant researchers. So, we have got, at those four regional centers, we have got electronic classrooms, connected to Mississippi State and other educational institutions. We have got a concentration of faculty members in appropriate disciplines to provide research and educational services for the activities that are in those regional areas. All those people are faculty members of Mississippi State University. They are under the same rules of operation, have always been that way, however, their initial responsibility is not to the students on the Starkville campus of Mississippi State, it is to the people that live in that region. It takes a little understanding at the administrative level and some other things to work out. One of the...the more difficult it should be the easiest is the university's holiday schedule. It is very very difficult to explain to the cotton farmers in the delta that our employees at the Delta need a spring break, or Dead Day (laughter) or the other kind of calendar things that we need to close down all those... MB: RF: I never thought about those things. It has been particularly difficult with the county agents, because their offices are in the courthouse. The people in the courthouse
know when they come to work and know when they leave, and if they are not there, then they talk about them. (laughter) Yet, the...you cannot have one class of employees working on a different work schedule form the rest of the employees. So, we have to deal with that and a lot of other things, but in general, the off-campus people are as loyal to Mississippi State and are as supportive to the total program at Mississippi State as any group you will ever see. MB: Well, I...one thing...a couple of other things we can talk about, but I just thought it might be good if you could look back over your career here, and maybe do an overview; obviously, we don't have time to get into every little specific detail, at the changes in technology. What has been the greatest impact on Mississippi in general? And maybe beyond, because what happens here, happens elsewhere. It is mind-boggling to think of the changes and beyond that to try to think of what caused them, or think back to the things that have happened. Of course, agriculture, forestry, activities, enterprises that we have supported are part of the global economy and they behave--they respond to global changes. I am not sure many people of today realize the transformation that has taken place in the countryside of the state of Mississippi. Really not in my time necessarily, it was well underway in 1969. One statistic that has stuck in my mind very very deeply is that Leake County south of us, Carthage is the county seat, was one of the most heavily farmed counties in the state in the early years of this century; all small farms, people...Harperville, and Madden, and Lena, communities Walnut Grove...in 1946, there were fourteen high schools in Leake County, Mississippi. They played a basketball tournament every year that was beyond comprehension and I would have loved to have seen it. The whole county shut down and everybody came to wherever the tournament was. Those were community high schools that there were enough people with kids in a twenty-mile radius or less to support a high school. Leake County has two high schools now. Three maybe, two or three. I think they have two public and one private. I think is right. The exodus post-World War II from the family farm to industry, education, all the kind of things that people do, has completely changed the political, social, and enterprise activities in the state. Interestingly enough, we still produce as much cotton today as we did in 1930 or whenever the peak for cotton acreage in the state. Mississippi used to have ten million acres of cotton. We now have
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a million acres of cotton, but we are producing the same number of bales on a million acres that we used to produce on ten. The same thing is true for any of the commodities that you wish to think about: dairy production, milk per cow is easily ten times what it was prior to World War II. All of the traditional commodities have increased in efficiency through a variety of different technologies. Interestingly enough, one enterprise that emerged as important after the war and has declined since then is beef cattle production. The initial response by the rural people here and elsewhere, when they gave up row crops, was to plant pastures and get beef cattle. In the mid-70s, the beef cattle industry in this state was a very thriving business. It was everywhere you looked, and it was expected to continue to grow. For one reason or another, beef cattle production has not developed the technology that has made it more efficient. Per capita consumption of beef has gone down. Poultry industry came on the scene. It went from backyard flocks that people grew their own chicken meat to a very technologically advanced system. They have replaced beef cattle in the economic and political spotlight. Now, we really have a very small beef cattle industry. It has shown some signs of reviving here lately. There has been a tremendous shift. Forest increase--there is a lot of the land that was in farming, in the small farms that is now in forest product. Still most of it in private landowners. The kinds of things that have made the greatest impact are mechanization to begin with, the tractor, the combine, and they get bigger and bigger every year. That did not really come on board until after World War II. You had a few tractors, but mostly animal power prior to that time. So, that was the first revolution was bringing in petroleum power, instead of animal power. The next was the chemical revolution in first fertilizer, and second, pesticides. Fertilizer, most people today do not realize what a difference that has made, but many people...my parents farmed and they did not know what fertilizer was when they started farming, and their yields showed it (laughters). Now, the technology of providing nutrients is very well developed. Probably the one that nonstudents of the field don't understand as well is weed control. In the humid south, particularly in the delta, mechanization was not really possible until weed control became possible with chemicals, because you still had to have people with hoes out there chopping cotton. If you had to have them to chop the cotton, you might as well keep them to pick the cotton. MB: RF: Yeah. Because you had to have that labor force. There was not way to control weeds except through manual labor, through running
tractors back and forth with cultivators, and it was labor intensive. When they discovered chemicals that would control weeds, it completely changed the labor requirements for farming. Then, yields got boosted further by insect technology, up to and including the boll weevil eradication, which is having its impact right now, hitting cotton production. But, the chemical revolution was followed by the computer revolution, the information revolution. [END TAPE 1, SIDE A] RF: Beginning in the 1960s, when Watson and Krick discovered the nature of DNA, the science and disciplines of biology have been transforming themselves. It is now Biotechnology. It really is what I like to call the new Biology, because we have just learned a lot more and we have the tools to learn a lot more about the way plants and animals' function, and their needs and their capabilities. The first application in agriculture, widespread of those technologies, was in diary production with bovine sumatatropin? (10), which was a biotechnology-derived injection that increased milk production. That has had an impact; a tremendous impact on the diary industry nationally. Unfortunately, it has had a very negative impact on the dairy industry in this state, because we had a state that was based on many many small dairies. Turns out bovine samatatropin? works on any cow, but on the very highly managed cows with high technology dairies, your benefits are much higher than they are in the low management situation. So, we have now seen the milk industry in the United States dominated by very very large dairy farms, concentrated in the desert areas of New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California. Very Very large, 1500 cows diaries, where we have 100 cow dairies. We have only one such dairy in this state, in Hinds County. It seems inevitable that we will have a few very very large dairy operations, and that has been difficult because the dairy farms have been the last of the true family farms. That is where momma and dad and all the kids work on the farm and they made pretty good money, it was a profitable business until technology has now brought it to the point that it needs to be much much larger. Mush of that is due to marketing. A lot of it is due to technology. At any rate, moving from the BST, the next technology to impact Mississippi agriculture was the genetic manipulation and modification of planting seed. Scientists learned fifteen years ago and perfected no more than ten years ago, probably closer to six, the ability to insert genetic material from one species into another. Thereby, introducing traits that could not be done before. The two that have revolutionized Mississippi agriculture is so-called BT cotton. That
is cotton that has had a gene from a bacteria, bacillus therungexus? inserted into the cotton plant. The bacteria makes a poison that kills butterflies, or kills the larva of butterflies. Now, you can plant a cotton seed that will result in a cotton plant that when a tobacco budworm or cotton bollworm, larva starts eating on it, the larva will die. Its got its own protection. Concurrently with that, there are technology firms, mostly private firms, have developed genes to be inserted in soybeans, corn, and other crops that make them impervious to a particular herbicide, which means that you can plant a seed that will produce a plant that you can spray with a weed killer and it wont hurt the plant, but it will kill everything else there, which makes for the ideal weed control. It has just completely transformed the weed control thing. Now, this is just the beginning. I am very proud that through leadership of Mac Portera and others, mostly since I left, and through gifts from the _________(59)? Foundation, that Mississippi State now has an institute for Biotechnology and Life Sciences. I think that _________? just gave them two million dollars not too far back. That is where the action is today and is going to be in the future. The opportunity to manipulate growth processes, to accomplish things that man wants to accomplish are just unlimited right now. Very exciting to think about it. One thing that I want to get to, and I guess that I will do this on a separate thing... the one thing of all the things that I have been privileged to participate in, that is absolutely unique to Mississippi and to Mississippi State is the catfish industry. MB: RF: MB: Ok. And I want to do that. I want to give you a long load on that because it is fascinating. We will pick up with that one next week. June 25, 2002 interview continues. I think we quit last time when you were getting ready to expound on the catfish industry. So, you can take off with that. Yeah, I think its good to look at the evolution of the catfish industry as an example of the way the university and the private sector can make a real difference. The fortunate thing about my career is that I came here prior to the beginning even of the vestiges or beginnings of a catfish industry and was positioned by the jobs that I held to be knowledgeable about what was going on. The actual farming of fish has been a dream for a lot of people for a long long time. Of course, it is widely done in Asian cultures, but in ways that do not really fit with our system. About the late 1960s, several things seemed to happen in Mississippi agriculture
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that pushed innovators to looking for new ways to do business. Interestingly enough, the catfish industry had its birth...it's debatable point (laughter) as to where the first catfish pond was, but there were a few innovators in the Mississippi Delta, but there was a concentration of people around Laurel, Mississippi who had been influenced by research that had been down at Auburn, and Alabama farmers across the line that were trying to catfish. Interestingly enough, one of those innovators was Charles Pickering, the current judge whose son is in the legislature in the Congress. The Pickering family was one of the earlier families in the catfish business and Charles Pickering was one of the first presidents, if not the first president, of the Catfish Farmers of Mississippi. At any rate, in 1973 as I recall, two or three, there was a happening that normally would not have been noticed in that sardines, a small fish that provide most of the fish meal used in animal feed, did not return to the coast of Peru. There was a El Nino or something. The price of fish meal went very very high. Well, Purina Food Company, er Feed Company was providing catfish feed. They just put a label on it and called it catfish feed. It was really a kind of a standard animal feed. They, looking at the bottom line costs, said we really can't afford to put fishmeal in the catfish food; we will put some plant protein that will substitute for it. So, the few fish farmers bought from Purina. Fed their fish all summer long. Harvested that fall and the fish were the same size that they had been when they put them in, because fish have a nutrient requirement that they have to have of a certain amount of animal protein in the feed, and the feed did not have it (laughter). So, I was assistance director of the experiment station at the time for Forestry, Wildlife, and Fisheries. Under the fisheries end of things, all of a sudden there was a room full of catfish farmers in Dorman Hall on this campus, saying, "Mississippi State has got to do something about this. The experiment station needs to activate the Animal Nutrition Committee," which I had never heard of and it had not been used for years and years and years. In the early days of Mississippi State, if you read the history, some of the first things they did was to do research into the kind of feed that dairy cows needed. Over the years, they had developed a group of faculty members that were called the Nutrition Committee. They actually had legal status to recommend to the State Commissioner of Agriculture the standards for animal feed that could be sold in the state. So, I convened the Nutrition Committee. Luckily, Dr. Ben Barintine? , who was head of the Department of Biochemistry at the time, had been...previously worked in a service laboratory that the experiment station had called Ag Chem lab that did analysis of these things, and he was very knowledgeable about what needed to be done. I knew nothing. At any rate, we paneled
a group of faculty members and some research was begun here. Really, it only took a review of literature to find out what had happened to the other thing. At any rate, Mississippi State got involved and the first thing was to determine the nutrient requirements of catfish. Dr. Bob Wilson in biochemistry is now internationally know for his work. First person to determine the amino acid requirements in the diet of catfish. At any rate, it was really an example of the expectation that are placed on Mississippi State. It was part of our job to do this. It was expected that we do that. If they had gone to another institution, they would have said, "Why are you here?" (laughter) You know. We had a cadre of people that just automatically accepted that it was necessary. We began, at that point, in trying to put together a research team that could work with this new industry and we were lucky enough in about 1977 or 8 to get a special appropriation to hire two researchers and put them at the Delta station in Stoneville, and start working with the industry. Our Department of Food Science with Dr. Gail Amerman? did some research that without it, the industry could not have moved ahead. He determined the basic data that goes on the label about the percent that and the percent this and the basic constituents of the food. Dr. John Waldruff in Ag Economics, who was a resource economist, had worked in regular agricultural areas, took a great interest and he developed a experiment station bulletin on the cost and returns for farming catfish. That book...that bulletin has been cited by many many people as the most single contributory factor to the growth of the catfish industry because it allowed the catfish farmers to go to their banks, and borrow money. It was developed in the same format that they used for row crops and other things. It was a budget. The farm loan officers could understand that. They started loaning money. Mostly in the Mississippi delta because the interest down in Laurel had sort of subsided, and the flat land and the abundant water resources in the delta led the industry to development there. The results are well know now. We have got the only really well developed food system that is based on a wild animal. There never has been previous to the Mississippi farm raised catfish activity, and instance where animals were taken directly from the wild, and put into cultivation and presented as a year round food supply for people. All of the other animals that we depend on were domesticated by people in prehistory, and went through thousands of years of adaptation...course the catfish is now going through a very rapid genetic development through research. Over at Stoneville, we have the largest concentration of aquaculture research scientists in the United States-- Federal and State. There is the Thad Cochran Warm Water Aquaculture Center there. That is a model for the research. It has grown now to where it is our
largest, behind poultry, our largest animal agriculture activity...above beef cattle and dairy cattle and swine. We have been raising cows and pigs for a long long time...but, throughout the development, the industry and the people here at Mississippi State have been just intertwined. One of my favorite stories is a fellow named Tom Slau?, who used to be a math professor on this campus, married into a delta family and ended up being a catfish farmer in the early years. He is now in the ready-mix concrete business in Jackson, but Tom is very proud of the fact, that in the early 70s, he offered to give a ride in his airplane to director Jim Anderson of the experiment station. Got him up in a small plane and about 5,000 feet, put the plane on autopilot, leaned over to him and put his hand on the exit door that Anderson was sitting right there and said, "Dr. let's talk about some catfish research." (Laughter) Sure enough, that was when some of the positions were redescribed so that people started working on catfish. That is the kind of thing that can be told over and over again. The agriculture and forest interest in this state expect something from Mississippi State. It is part of the job in their mind, and I guess in the legislatures mind as well since they continue to appropriate funds. MB: How did this impact... in the delta especially, how did this impact other crops, because I always thought the catfish farming was much less risky to farmers than the other crops that they planted because it did not depend so much on the weather and other factors. Well, the...it has been a real interesting sociological phenomenon. For many years, people have tried new crops in the delta. Vegetable crops is the most notable. About every ten years, somebody goes into the vegetable business big. It does not last very long. Usually in...the story is that the Mississippi delta farmer only wants to work during the summer time, doesn't want to work during the winter time, doesn't want to get involved in a production system that is twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They are custom to their cotton and... it is a cultural kind of thing. Well, a former colleague, Dr. Walter Porter, who used to be superintendent of the delta station, and was the assistant director of MAFES here, said all along that is hogwash. There is just not enough money in those other things to interest those people. Those people do whatever they can make money at doing. Sure enough, catfish came along, and it proved to be that way. Now there is an interesting thing about catfish in the delta. The pioneers of the catfish industry were not the leaders of the cotton, soybean, and rice industry. There were what I call the "second sons." They were people who were maybe the son of the postmaster or
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someone that did not inherit a lot of land, whose family did not have a lot of land. Some were small farmers, but mostly they were college trained people who did not fit...did not have the resources to get into the plantation economy. They would gamble. They could take a chance, and it was very risky the first five years. The markets were not proven. Production was more predictable. Although during the early years, before diseases were understood, there were a lot of failures. Still, that early group proved the system. They worked it put to where it became less risky and once they had done that, the traditional leader moved in and basically took it over. The same people who dominated cotton production dominate catfish production...just about, not entirely. It has had a lot of economic and social changes. Probably the major thing was the creation of factory work in places that previously had no options for anyone to earn wages working inside a building. The catfish processing industry...I don't know what the current figures are, but the last I heard were 4,000 people, and I am sure that it is more than that now. These are...they are not the best jobs in the world, but they are jobs in a place where there were no jobs. MB: RF: Right, right. They are mostly held by black females, who had no employment opportunities in the geographic areas in which they live. That has made a tremendous difference in building a black middle class in the delta. I think that as years go on, the sons and daughters of those families that had a steady income coming in--granted that two minimum wages incomes is not a whole lot--but, I think that those young people are going to move a step up the ladder, and we will see the delta move along. The catfish industry is by no means at its peak yet. Per capita consumption of fish products is increasing. Catfish is still at the very top of the list; that is under the control of American interest. I was told just a week or so ago that all of the aquaculture production of salmon, which if you notice you can see a lot of salmon in the grocery store now. It is all produced in nets in the harbors and _______? of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. All that production is controlled by one Norwegian firm--every pound of it. They are going to hold back production to a level that will allow them to make a large profit. The catfish industry will be like most other American industries, very competitive. As research allows them to be more productive, the prices will come down and it will be a source of economical and very good food for the people.
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What other aspects of aquaculture has the university been involved with? I remember at one time, they were talking the domestic production of shrimp and some other areas other than catfish. Yeah. We had interest in...and I forget just the exact year, but legislature made available funding for alternative aquaculture species. There was a feeling and still is, that the industry would be more stable if they had options where they could rotate crops and depend on different markets. We did not analysis. A lot of that was led by Dr. A.D. Seal, who was associate director of the experiment station during that period. Our original thought was to encourage the aquacultural production of saltwater shrimp, which is the kind of shrimp that most Americans eat. But, as we...we visited Corpus Christi, Texas, which is the center of American shrimp aquaculture. Then, took a close look at the Mississippi Gulf Coast and decided that we really did not have the land resource there adjacent to the salt water to grow man shrimp. Our coastal resources are very limited compared to Texas. So we chose freshwater shrimp, interestingly enough, because of some consultants from Yosheva? University in Israel, because they are very very prominent in shrimp production...freshwater shrimp production in Israel. We hired some of the brightest young faculty members that we have ever had at Mississippi State. One is still here getting all kinds of awards, _____ _____, who had is doctorate from Yale, who was and still is a very very productive individual. The freshwater shrimp is a, in global terms, significant part of the food system. There are some...it is a very difficult animal to breed and grow. Once you get the baby shrimp to put into a pond, you have got pretty well and easy crop to grow, but getting the shrimp to breed in captivity and handling the microscopic little animals is a very high tech business. Lou and his associates pretty well perfected a system of shrimp production for the lower south area. It has not completely taken off yet. Primarily because a high development of technology sort of parallelled the globalization of the economy of the world. We are now getting aquaculture-raised shrimp from Asia, particularly Red China at a price that we cannot compete with. The shrimp that you eat mostly is coming from there now. Most of it is saltwater shrimp, because they have abundant marshes and they are able to grow the saltwater species. You do see the freshwater shrimp on the grocery store shelves occasionally. As I read in the paper, there is an organization, a corporation, in south Mississippi that intends to build a nursery to produce the seed stock. That is the key element. If we ever have availability of seed stock at a reasonable price, the cultivation, harvest, and sale of the product is very very good. It does suffer from the difficulty that it requires
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water temperature above fifty-five degrees, which means when it gets along about October--November in Starkville, you better be ready to harvest your crop or they will all die(laughter). That puts the whole crop on the market all on the same day, which causes difficulty with marketing. The thing about catfish that makes it so attractive is that you can harvest 365 a year. They can transport the catfish to the processing plant alive, which is a guarantee of freshness. If you have an aquatic animal that can not be harvested and maintained alive to the processing plant, you bring it in on ice, and nobody knows how long it has been on that ice for sure. Therefore, the processor cannot afford to pay as high a price knowing that some of it, when they get to processing, it will be spoiled. So, its little things like that have contributed to the catfish thing. MB: I want to ask you a question about catfish that I have always wondered about as a boy fishing in the Big Black River in north Choctaw County. We caught mudcat was what they were called. Of course, over in the Grenada reservoir and other places, they were different color and called channel cat. What exactly is the difference? They are different species of animals. Just about like the difference between a red ear brim and chinquapin brim or whatever. They will interbreed if you force them to. No, they are the blue channel cat, and I forget all the different species, but... Now, the farm raised catfish... The farm raised catfish is a channel cat. There are some uses...some hybrids coming out now that apparently have some benefits and some advantages. I don't know exactly how many species of catfish there are; there are a number of them. We recently had a pretty good political controversy over Vietnamese catfish that had been coming in. They are not really a catfish at all. Although they look a whole lot like a catfish. They don't taste like one. Yeah, I been hearing Paul Lot on his radio show...complaints about that. Well, is there any other...we had...this was the next in a series of comments that you have been making on changes in agriculture in the state during your career. Is there anything else that you want to add before we go on? Well, yes. I guess one thing that...we touched on catfish. We have touched on computers. We have touched on biotechnology, I
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think. Two other things that have been very very major, and will be more so in the future. The first to hit was what I label privatization. I am talking about privatization of research and education and service that used to be provided by Mississippi State. Now, it has been absorbed by the private sector. It has been a traumatic experience in a lot of ways. We have a very large building on this campus called the Pace Seed? Technology Laboratory. Mississippi State was internationally known and prominent in the seed technology business, which was a combination of the biology and engineering of processing seeds, but more importantly it was...we provided leadership in organizing the seed production activities of farmers because the traditional pattern of row crop agriculture followed in the gulf south particularly, and really nationwide, was that the public agencies, the state or the federal agencies did the genetic work and developed the variety of cotton or whatever, and provided, almost at cost and in many cases subsidized, the foundation seed to private seed growers who would then grow the crop under inspection by Mississippi State or the State Department of Agriculture. Then, the farmer would sell that seed under certification process that was run by a committee or.... It was very well developed in Mississippi, and we were know for our ability to produce good seed. We sold seed everywhere. A sack of seed corn is worth a whole lot more that a sack of corn that you are going to feed a chicken. Well, it was too much of a good thing. There was enough money to be made in seed production that during my time here, I have seen seed production almost entirely captured by commercial firms, by multinational firms. The most uniquely identified with Mississippi, I guess is the cottonseed market. I read in this morning's paper that Delta Pine and Land Company Scott, Mississippi, has seventy percent of the cottonseed market worldwide. They produce seventy percent of the cottonseed. They do so under their own patents with limited involvement from public sector. We cooperate with them. Delta Pine and Land has contributed money to the university, and I believe the library has the papers from when they were in the farming business. But, the same thing has happened with weed control and with insect control. Agriculture now is less dependent on farmer to farmer sales and co-ops and all the structures that socially bond together farmers, has been modified, I guess, to meet the realities of today's economic world to where they buy and they buy by the same methods as any other consumer buys. They buy things that are advertised. Things that a sales staff convinces people to buy. That is very different from what used to be. We used to have monstrous crowds come to the branch experiment stations to look at variety trials, where we would plant all of the different kinds of soybean
seed developed by the different states and everything. Farmers would make their decisions based on what the experiment station had in the variety trials. That has been tremendously changed because now the market is just different. You see it advertised on TV, or the sales representatives... I visited the world's largest corn seed company in Iowa not too many years back. They said they had 4,700 sales representatives in the United States selling corn seed. It was interesting to me because there are only 4,000 agriculture county agents in the United States that are hired by the government to give advice to farmers. So you have got a choice to whether you take your advice from a civil servant or from a salesman who is equipped with a laptop and has a hat to give away, and all kinds of things (laughter). So, privatization has made a very great difference and will make an even greater difference in agriculture in the future. Whereas Mississippi State used to raise bulls to sell. We don't do that anymore. We used to have a lot of things that we were quasi-in business to do, because somebody had to do it. Well, now the private sector is more that willing to do it. In many instances, they do an excellent job and in some instances, it is not to the best interest to particularly Mississippi. As long as the State of Mississippi was doing, there was a willingness to go a little extra. What we have developed I think and will continue to do, is that we will try to see those news industries that the private sector cannot afford to deal with or more importantly, the niche industries, the markets that are to small for the big companies. The big seed companies now are saying that they can't afford to do research on crops that are not planted in such volume that they can get their money back. Basically, I think that they are seven crops that they can deal with. That does not include sweet potatoes. Does not include okra. Does not include a lot of things that people eat. So, I think that we will be working on new crops and niche market crops. The other innovation that has changed tremendously since I have been in this business is the environmental consequences of what we do in the land. Prior to about 19, really 65, there was really very little concern about the environment. It just was not factored in. Now the general public is very much attuned. In agriculture and forestry, there is just nothing that isn't influenced by potential impact on the environment. It is a variable thing from location to location. It has a tremendous impact. It is in the environmental side of things that Mississippi State again becomes of ultimate importance. The private sector is not going to provide leadership in environmental management research because there is relatively little way to make a profit doing that. So, it seems to me as a state agency, we need to be ahead of the game doing research on environmental consequences--positive and negative--to keep our producers and landowners and general
public producing and enjoying environment that Mississippi has. I think that that is one of the real opportunities that we can take. Mississippi has a wonderfully clean environment compared to most everywhere. If we can capitalize on that... I think something of great value. MB: I wanted to ask you a question. Senator McCain said yesterday on the news that some of the problems with the wild fires that they are having in Arizona...Senator John McCain of Arizona was that environmentalists had filed to many lawsuits to prevent the burning of underbrush at certain times of the year, so that if a fire came along, it could be better controlled. I know in my own home county of Choctaw that periodically in the National Forest around there, they do burn the underbrush. So, you mentioned environmentalism can have, I guess in that respect, a negative impact. Oh, no question about it. We have had...I think most knowledgeable people would say...I'm talking about scientifically knowledgeable and people who understand the history, that we have gone entirely too far in many many parts of the world. In many parts of the United States. I don't know about the world. In attributing natural to neglect. We have tremendous fuel loads now, all through the western national forest, through many of the southern forests, for different reasons, that have accumulated all of this flammable material that makes it very very difficult to control those fires. We could have the same kind of situation in parts of Mississippi. I think the severity of the last several seasons of fires have changed the public policy. If you look at the last year's appropriation to the Forest Service, they appropriated a 100% increase to allow them to begin a fuel reduction thing. The Los Alamos fires were the ones that I think really got people because there was no reason for that to have happened. It should have been prevented. Forest fire is another thing about Mississippi that is worth another tape or two. I am not the key person in that, but forest fire has made a tremendous...has had an impact on how this state has grown up, particularly in south Mississippi where there never were the small farmers there were in Choctaw County. Out west there are two things that have happened. One is they have prevented the slash disposal and prescribed burning that used to go on. Third, they have stopped road building and in fact caused some roads to be torn up to mean that you can not get a bull dozer in to put the fire out with. In those circumstances, you really have no choice but to let it burn. With people living out in the forest now...that is what gets peoples attention. It is not the woods burning, it is the cabins. So that is a whole new issue and
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something that would be, I think, good to capture is the impact of woods burning as far as fires, particularly in south Mississippi. There are some good books out on that. [End Tape 1, Side B] [Begin Tape 2, Side A] MB: Ok, the final section that we are going to cover here are the...we have it listed on our program interview sheet as social changes and changes in general at MSU, and that would include academic. Why don't we just combine those and you can just comment on the social and academic changes that you have observed during your years here at the campus? Really besides the physical changes on the campus, the buildings and all of that, the changes that I have observed on campus are social changes. It would be very difficult to rank these in order, but I have four thing that came to mind immediately that just completely changed the entire environment--racial integration has got to be very high, gender equity has got to be very very high, urbanization of the student body in the state, and related to that but much larger is what I call the death of the cow college. That death of the cow college thing is an incendiary kind of thing. It includes a whole raft of institution changes that have been made in light of the social changes. Course the racial integration thing is something in my mind that Mississippi State can be exceptionally proud of. I have had experiences at a lot of southern institutions and I feel confident in saying that Mississippi State has handled this very difficult transition as well or better than any. When I came here in 1969, we had a hand full of black students. It was a very very small hand full. I can't recall when the first one came here was 65 or 66 or something like that? I was here in when the first black athletes were recruited, when the first black faculty members were hired, when the first black was elected student body president, and all the other things. While it has in no means been perfect, and I don't know of anyone that claims perfection in this, people who were instrumental in that can be very very proud of the way the institution has absorbed and welcomed this change. I think our student body today is not as completely indicative of the total population of the state, but it is fast approaching that. Close, yeah. We have some of the finest black students that anybody could ever have. So, that is one that I don't need to expound on, but it is something. Gender equality has in many ways had an identical
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kind of an activity. The co-eding of the university had begun significantly before I got here. By the time I got here, it was pretty far along. It has made a tremendous difference. Of course, it has mirrored the changes in the world of work. We no longer have traditional female work and male work. It has made a great difference in the classroom and the outlook of the campus and of course the world around us--all for the better. MB: RF: I have noticed the really large numbers of female graduates in veterinarian medicine. Well, that is national trend. It is going even more rapidly than most people would prefer. Yes, it is well over half now, sixty percent. In some colleges, up to seventy and eighty percent. It is an indication of the interest of many many young ladies in dealing with animals and the fact that it is a highly selective field, the young ladies have brought more to the table when it comes to admissions to the colleges. Same thing is true in other fields throughout: engineering, whatever. There are no longer any dominant male field. Now, agriculture has been less rapidly assimilated in many regards, particularly at the faculty level. Part of that is kind of a social thing. It will go away. The gender equity is something that has made a tremendous difference on this campus, and tying it to the racial thing, something that many people do not stop to realize. I have said it over and over again. In 1964, I believe, you can check it, the enrollment of Mississippi State was somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,000 white males. In 1999, the enrollment of Mississippi State was something like 7,000 white males. All the growth in enrollment that had taken place has been in females and other races. People take that for granted now, but just think if we had been allowed to stay, or forced to stay, as an all-boys school. What would we be like today? It blows your mind. Urbanization thing is a very real thing. When I came here in 69, every student basically had at least a grandfather and many of them has fathers who were employed in farming, or from the country. They might not have been farming, but they lived in the country at any rate. They were rural. Now, the typical student does not have a grandfather on the farm anymore. They are further removed from that. It has had an impact on the student body. The students majoring in agriculture have to be taken on a field trip to see what a farm is. Whereas in years past, that was not necessary. It is also brought all the differences in outlook and expectations that an urban situation presents as compared to the rural population. There are pluses and minuses. Generally speaking, the rural young people are more generalist, they are broader, they experience more things, because
they went to a small school and they had to participate in everything. The urban students are more specialized. They have had opportunities and they have chosen those things and have been able to become better public speakers or whatever they wanted to be. So that has made a difference. The demise of the cow college is something that a lot of people, a lot of current alumni are upset about. They have been for twenty or thirty years because at the time, this was the cow college that people talk about and read about. Post-World War II years really, up until the mid-60s, agriculture and agriculture related things were the dominant thing that happened. People were kind of proud of it. The cow college was new to being a plus. In the 70s, 80s, and 90s, it gradually became not a positive thing. Being known as the cow college was not something that people wanted. The university changed, as it should have and became much more diverse; much more like other universities. There are still people who have a hard time coming to grips with that. People who were here when the president of the student body always came from the ag school, and things of that nature. That is not the world that we are in. Another thing that not necessarily was related to the cow college component, but I think probably had something to do with the leadership being changed from what it was, is that changes in university governance and the entire operation of the university that have accompanied this change from the cow college to the modern comprehensive university that we are now. When I came here, I interviewed with four people. Now, we have got presidential candidates interviewing today that will interview 40,000 people probably. Department heads and faculty members being considered for employment go through a week long exposure to many many committees. The choice of hiring or not hiring is generally defuse. There is no real boss, top down kind of mentality. There was in the cow college. When it was cow college it was the president hired the vice-presidents. The vice-presidents hired the deans. The deans hired the department heads. The department heads hired the faculty. The loyalty was in that order. You could hire them and you could fire them. Well, that is no longer part of the equation in this university or any other. It makes a tremendous difference in the way in which business is done. That to me is probably the greatest difference, and one that I never quite got used to (laughter). I grew up and people of my age generally grew up in a hierarchical environment where there was a boss and you got ahead in life by doing what your boss wanted you to. That is not the case in the modern university. As a matter of fact, in many instances, what the boss wants you to do is not necessarily in your individual self-interest. So, people don't do it. We used to have, and it was very obvious, the mechanisms that existed. When I first
became a dean, with Dr. Giles as president, we had an administrative council and an academic council, both of which had to vote on changes in the curriculum. The administrative council dealt with things like roads and streets and houses and things that the academic council. The academic council was composed of the deans and a few other people. They had to...all the deans had to vote in order for one of the deans to change the curriculum. It was a very...some great debates in there. It kept everybody aware of what everyone else was doing. In more cases supporting of it. It is ever passed, everybody was for it. That move to an executive council of vice-presidents doing the voting under other presidents notably McComas and Zacharius. Then under Portera, it moved to the president making the decisions (laughter). Those are just management kinds of things, but they have a tremendous impact on the people approach their day to day-by-day work. There are people today concerned about who will be the next president even though they will probably see that person once a year and not truly be impacted directly that much by what that person does. At any rate, the university governance, obviously the faculty is much more involved than they were at promotion and tenure. That used to be a very very strong top down process as a matter of fact. I came here without tenure being mentioned to me. I did not ask and nobody said. Four years later, I got a letter from the president saying that I had been granted tenure. I never applied for (laughter) tenure. It was just a decision that the administration made as to who got tenure. Most everybody did. Of course now, it's a very very involved process. Very complicated. MB: RF: Complicated. The net result of these kinds of changes...well, I guess one other thing that I ought to say is of getting back to the demise of the cow college. I should have said, and the positive way to say it is the growth of the comprehensive university. Prior to the mid-60s, agriculture was the only place you could get a PhD here. Agriculture was the only place research was done, because there was research money available to do that. Yeah. As it has been described to me, and had I observed it when I came here even in 1969. The non-agriculture part of the campus was pretty well and undergraduate college. Education gave higher degrees, and I guess most everybody got authorized to give PhDs in the early seventies, late sixties. There really was not much in the way of research. I give great great credit to Chester McKee for
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bringing this university into a comprehensive research program. One thing that I want to get on the record that not many people are aware of is that Louis Wise, the vice-president for agriculture was the strongest supporter of Chester McKee in this activity because he recognized that it would not be healthy for agriculture to continue to be the only place that had anything. We would be better off if the rest of the university could come up to our standards. If they could not, we would probably brought down to theirs. So, the early money to build a research capacity came from the ag side without much known about it to enable the university to build a research capacity. The computing business is the best way example. The first computer that Mississippi State ever got was paid for by the Business Affairs department and the Ag Department, but it was used very very heavily by the research compliment in math and engineering. The money did not come from there, but the recognition was that it needed to be, whether the university needed to have a computer. That was the only way it was going to get one. Of course, the same computer wrote the checks and did everything else. The growth of research in Biological Sciences, Engineering, Education, the Sciences in Arts and Sciences has obviously been one of the major major transformation on this campus while I have been here and it is all for the better. It is a wonderful wonderful thing. The ag people, at least leadership, understood that was to their advantage to have that and have supported it. There is always been and I guess always will be some jealousy between the faculty in agriculture and the faculty that is outside. One of the things that has bothered me. I completely failed to make an impact on is...I think it is ridiculous that we have two kinds of faculty members-- ninemonth faculty and twelve-month faculty. That presents a division and a great amount of confusion that just ought not to be there. They ought to be all the same. My bias is that they all ought to be twelve-month, because there is plenty of work to do. Then I have always been a twelve-month employee. Many many of the ninemonth faculty do not want to be twelve-month even though they would like to make more money, which is what they see the twelve-month faculty doing is making more money. That is one of the internal things that was a frustration. The changes outside of the ones that I have already talked about that seem to me to be worth mentioning is that the horizons that Mississippi State as an institution have recognized have expanded tremendously in the time that I have been here. I may have said earlier, but I will say it again. It is something that I have heard over the years, and it does not need to be forgotten--I was told that before Dean Colvard came here as president in 61, the attitude on the Mississippi State campus was, "we can't afford to do things right. We don't have
the money." When he left five years later, the attitude on this campus was, "we can't afford not to do things right." Apparently that man had enough of a vision and strength of leadership quality to convince the campus to make a turn around. Of course, he hired a group of vice-presidents who stayed in the vice-presidency from the early sixties to the early eighties. Those people need to be recognized--John Bettersworth, Louis Wise, T. K. Martin, J.C. McKee, particularly those four. Bob Jones came in...he was a latecomer to that process in Student Affairs. The Vice-President for Business Affairs through most of the growth years was Louis Mallory. MB: RF: Right. That position...that was a support position. The ones that really bought in and changed this university were Bettersworth, Martin, Wise, and McKee. They worked with each other for twenty-years. It was the joy of my life working under them. Mississippi State did not have a procedural manual. We did not have a policy manual. If you wanted to know what you could do, if you did not know, you would call one of those four people. All four of them would give you the same answer. You did not have any...there was never any in-fighting amongst them, other than the normal kind of joking around. Yeah. In terms of where they were and what they wanted, they were firmly joined at the hip. Much of what this university is a result of that twenty years of stability at the vice-presidential level. During that time, we had Colvard, Giles, McComas, and part of Zacharias; particularly, the first three. Very very different presidents, very different, all three of them. But, the basic day-by-day existence and vision of this university stayed the same and they did expand their horizons. They looked at what we could be rather than what we couldn't be. Right. Now, the...obviously the number of majors and all of those kind of things are in the record. You can count the graduates and you can see the growth the has taken place during that time. But, throughout it all, I guess the thing that I am the most thankful for is that this institution still has the same personality that it had when I came here thirty years ago. It's an amazing thing. There is no real excuse for it...no reason for it that I know. But, the general
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expectation on this campus is that the student is going to come first. No matter where the money comes from, no matter what the bosses say, the faculty and the secretaries and the library staff and everybody recognizes and really enjoys the fact that we are here because of the students. That is there. It is still there just like it was. It makes this place, I think, what it is. The other thing is that there is a very deep appreciation for the contributions of individuals here. I have seen instances of people being treated with less respect than they should have but they are very rare. By and large, this is an institution that values those who work together and there has been a great deal of honesty in the management. I think that reflects the state we live in, the nature of the people who come through here, and I hope that it is so deeply entrenched that it will stay that way. MB: I want to get your comment...maybe we can wrap it up with this. I guess, I have been around here for a goodly number of years too. I guess President McComas was the one who really began to emphasize arts, and maybe the Arts and Sciences aspect of the university. Yet, it is observation that we still have the basic personality we were founded on. That is that engineering and agriculture still are what we are known for basically. Not really to the detriment of the other departments. They have grown too, but it seems we have managed somehow to hang on to land-grant status that is our roots. Well, yeah. Although it is a difficult thing to quantify. I guess the thing that I think drives it is that the...again, the student body, the undergraduate student body is the dominant force. Undergraduate student body at Mississippi State, in my judgement, comes here to prepare themselves to make a better living than their mommy and daddy did. That is different that a lot of other institutions. A lot of of institutions the students come there for intellectual breadth and maturity. Because, mommy and dad made more money than they needed, therefore it is not a driver. The question about what are you going to do when you get out of school is not the dominant question on many campuses. It is on this one even today. I think so. It reflects the state of Mississippi. We have got a lot of middle class and low class people here economically--much more than we have upper class. Now, Mississippi State draws from all segments. We are not just poor kids in the state. We have a good deal of wealthy people too. Generally speaking, there is not that many families that have old enough wealth to have forgotten that
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wealth is acquired by hard work. So, I attribute that kind of thing to the people of this state and the students that come here and the expectations that are laid on them. You can go into the arts...our Art program is a wonderful program very very heavily subscribed to by students. But, what kind of art is it? It is computer graphics, and its animation, and its artwork for advertisement, and our art students are not planning to go starve in a _______ somewhere. They are coming here and using a talent to make a living. That is a good example, I think. I wish all the departments on this campus would recognize that. You know, if they want to fit in and prosper in this environment, they need to find a peg to hang their graduates on. Broadcast meteorology--I mean you know. What would the geography and geology department have to brag about if it had not been for one faculty member who said "I am teaching climatology and we got a bunch of people out their practicing climatology that don't know what they are doing." So, we got people coming here to prepare themselves for employment in a particular area. That is not the way I would personally like to see it. I wish that our population could reach the point to where people could look at the four years of undergraduate work as a broadening and maturing experience. Then go to graduate school and prepare for making a living. If I had to do it over again, and I would have loved to have done that. In my family circumstances that just was not even considered. You went to college to do something. I think that is still the reason why most of the students at Mississippi State come to Mississippi State. That is the land-grant concept. The traditional Ivy League university is absolutely indifferent to what kind of jobs its people get. MB: RF: Exactly. I get tickled every time I see the surveys where they show that the graduates of Yale and Harvard and Princeton on the average make more money than the graduates of any other segment. But, then the families of the graduates of Yale, Harvard, and Princeton have enough money for them to live off of and never turn a lick. We don't have many like that that are planning to go back and live off the trust funds. That's really, in my judgement, what keeps Mississippi State going. It's one reason why people come here to employ our graduates. I know that for a fact because I have placed a many a graduate with employment. They say your graduates come to us prepared to work. Now, we did not teach them that [laughter]. We encouraged them, but they came to Mississippi State not looking for a free ride. They came to prepare themselves to do better. That's why I think that long-term, and its going to be a long long time, this racial situation in this state we see now what
I consider to be the cream of the young black youth coming to Mississippi State. They are coming here because they can get something here that they can convert into a better life for themselves. They have no different motivations that anybody else that has ever come here. They come in greater numbers every year. We don't make...you cant talk about it as much. You get accused of being racist. I am so proud of the fact that the second highest number of black majors on this campus is in electrical engineering. The first highest is in education. That is a much broader field and there is a lot more people. I don't know what the count is now, but when I was still working there was seventy-five or eighty, hundred black electrical engineers on this campus. I guarantee you those people will not be worrying about economic activity when they get away from here. MB: RF: MB: No. But, anyway I have enjoyed chatting with you and I could chat a lot longer, but I don't think anybody would want to listen. Well, we sure appreciate it. Well, as this program goes along, and we develop some different areas...subject areas...we may get back with you on some of these others. We will go ahead and close it right here. You want me to read these names of these people? I will just take them down from your list, and that will be fine. I will just leave this note with you... [End Tape 2, Side 1]
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CHARM Oral History Project Interview of: Dr. Rodney Foil June 18, 2002 and June 25, 2002 Interviewer: Dr. Michael Ballard Location: Stennis Montgomery Room, Mitchell Memorial Library Mississippi State University campus Dr. Michael Ballard: Ok, we will just start with part one of this format we are using and just give us, for the sake of the record, your background: where you were born, who you married, how many kids you got, we will just do the personal section in any order that you want to do it. Dr. Rodney Foil: Ok. My name is Rodney Foil. Officially by the army and others, Robert Rodney Foil. Currently live in Starkville, and have lived here since 1969. Married with two children-- son, who is fortytwo, and a daughter who is forty. Both live out of state. I started out as a very very na�ve college student at LSU in 1952. Came from a middle-class family, and only one member of the remote family had ever gone to college. My dad's youngest brother had gone to LSU and majored in Forestry, so I did. I really didn't know that there were other things that they taught there at the time (laughter). But, I got a bachelors in Forestry in 1956, Masters in Forestry in 1960, and a doctorate in Forestry at Duke in 1965. At the completion of my bachelor's degree, I was drafted, served two years in the army during the Cold War. There really wasn't a whole lot going on in the army. But, I did serve in Texas and Alaska. I got an early out from the Army to come back and get a Masters degree. Had it not been for the opportunity to leave the army a little bit early, I would have probably gone back to being an industrial forester in Georgia, which was what I was doing when I was drafted. At any rate, after completing a Masters, I found that I could make more money with educational institutions than I could with industry at that particular time, so I went to work for LSU at an off campus research station in north Louisiana: The North Louisiana Hill Farm Experiment Station, which I joined at the instructors level in 1960. Stayed there until 1967, with a year off on sabbatical to get a doctorate at Duke. In 1967, I left the research arena and went to Baton Rouge main campus to become a statewide extensions specialist in forestry. Maintained that job for a couple of years, then was offered the opportunity to come here to
Mississippi State as department head in the Department of Forestry. I came in October 1969. The reasons for coming to Mississippi State were interesting. Of course, like most people, it was a chance to make more money, and I had two young children at the time, preschool. I think one in the first grade. The princely salary of $12,000 a year, was offered to me to come here as a department head, which was a few thousand dollars more than I was making where I was as I recall. So that was the primary thing. Of course, it was a considerable promotion to come here as department head. Interestingly enough, even though I grew up in an adjoining state, I had never been on the Mississippi State campus until I came here for an interview. I was immediately struck by the very friendly campus, the high importance that the administration placed on the position that I was going to be taking. I was interviewed by the then president Bill Giles. I had worked at LSU for ten year, eleven years without every having met the president of LSU. MB: RF: That impressed you right away? Impressed me a lot. As a sideline, just to show you how university governance has changed, I came here and had dinner with the then Dean of the School of Forestry, Bob Klap. Then, the next morning, began my interview schedule. I interviewed with Dr. Jim Anderson, who was director of the experiment station; Dr. Louis Wise, who was Vice-President for Agriculture and Forestry; Dr. John Bettersworth, who was Vice-President for Academic Affairs; and Dr. Bill Giles, who was president. At three o'clock that afternoon, Dean Klap offered me the job. I did not meet a single faculty member (laughter) in the department that I was to be the head of. Although, I had met some of them previously. The interview process was a much more direct process in those days than it is today. Well, I think we got up to where you had been offered a job here at Mississippi State. Obviously, you accepted it. I did and never regretted it. Mississippi State and the state of Mississippi has been very very good to me. Could we talk a little bit about the Department of Forestry when you came here? How developed it was then and how it evolved under your leadership? Well, that is interesting and something that I very proud of. The history of forestry education and research here at Mississippi State
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is interesting because it mirrors an educational philosophy that this state has had and still has to some degree. Forests have been important in the economy and the life of Mississippians from the beginning. It's a forested state and has always been influenced greatly by forest industry and the people use the forest a lot. During the early years of scientific forestry in the United States, much of the research was done in Mississippi. The US Forest Service was active here. They had an experiment station in New Orleans that did most of its fieldwork in Mississippi. But, there was no Forestry School here. LSU started a professional forestry school in 1926. Through my time there in the early 50s, half the student body was from Mississippi. Yet, the state of Mississippi said we can't afford to have a forestry school. We will let Mississippians come to community college or Mississippi State for two years, and then the can transfer and go get a forestry degree somewhere else. That continued until 1954 when through pressure from the legislature actually, Mississippi State decided to create a four-year forestry program here. It's a ________ story, but I tend to believe it. The people in forestry who brought this change about succeeded because they told...err, got the legislature to say, that if Mississippi State does not put in a forestry school, we are going to authorize one at Southern. All of a sudden, Mississippi State decided they wanted a forestry school (laughter). That is a lot... MB: RF: That's believable. That is about what happens in Mississippi education, but at any rate, the first professional graduate from the forestry program was in 1956, which was the same year the I graduated from LSU in a class of thirty, fifteen of whom were from Mississippi. At the onset, and it was pretty hardscrabble. It was hard to find the money to really have a professional forestry school. Bob Klap was the founding dean. We had actually a Department of Forestry in the College of Agriculture. Then in 1961, couple of things happened that were of great significance. One, is that Dean Colvard came here as president of Mississippi State. He came from North Carolina State, where he had been Dean of the College of Agriculture. North Carolina State had a very very outstanding forestry program. He was supporting in that. He hired, as his Vice-President for Agriculture and Forestry, Bill Giles, who had been superintendent of the Stoneville Branch Experiment Station in Stoneville, and had as one of his closest closest friends, an individual named J.S. "Sid" McKnight, who was a research forester with the US Forest Service at Stoneville. Sid and his colleagues in forestry in the delta had convinced Dr. Giles of the importance of forestry. Dr. Giles was originally trained as a
botanist before he becomes an agronomist and he liked the outdoors. At any rate, in 61, they began to commit to really building a forestry program. They created a School of Forestry in 66 with the transfer of the Wildlife Program from the Department of Zoology to the new School of Forestry. That transfer consisted of transferring one individual and two graduate students, Dr. Dale Arner? who had been a professor of zoology became head of the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. They created a department from the Forest Products Utilization Laboratory that had been created in 1964. Dr. Warren Thompson had been hired to head this research organization and was just getting it started. The buildings were being completed when I cam in 69. So, the pieces were in place when I came here. We had the three departments created. The Forestry Department, which was the founding department, had twelve faculty members when I came--twelve professors. Wildlife and Fisheries, by then, had grown to two. Forest Products had three perhaps four faculty level people. But, some things had happened that really convinced me very early on that the future was quite bright. One is that in 1962, the Congress of the United States passed the McEntire-Stennis Forestry Research Act, which resulted in money being transferred to the states in 1964, but was earmarked and required to be spent on forest resources research. That resulted the beginning allocation to Mississippi was something like $50,000 out of a million and a half dollars nationally. But, it was enough to get the attention of the policymakers. It was enough to hire a professor, perhaps two at the time. It gave an impetus in the state legislature to really call into play the power of the forest interests in the state. So, beginning in 69, we were able to just ride a wave of public interest and economic understanding because the pulp and paper industry began to expand in Mississippi at the time. Weyerhaeuser Company came to the state. There were just a number of things that happened in the 70s that allowed us to develop. One of things that was asked in the questionnaire was what are some of my career highlights. One of those was that in 1976, when the Society of American Foresters came here to review us for accreditation. They had come in 1971, when I was very new here. They gave us provisional accreditation. One of the comments that they made that they considered negative was that the forestry program at Mississippi State was too responsive to the needs of Mississippi and the Mississippi forest industry (laughter). But, we did not take into account the _______ world and that we were not very cosmopolitan. I took that to be a great compliment. MB: I would think so.
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Yet, we did...that meant they came back in five years. During that five-year period, we were successful in getting some appropriations from the legislature to expand the faculty, to expand the scope. Enrollment increased probably by a factor of doubling during that period. We got full unconditional accreditation in 1976. It was...the report was held in the president's conference room in Allen Hall. I remember when we walked out of there, Louis Wise, the Vice-President said he truly wished that Dr. Giles had been there to hear this because he had heard all the things that said we can's afford a good forestry school in Mississippi, therefore we should not have one (laughter). So, there has been a great change. Twelve faculty members when I came, six of those had the doctorate, six did not. The focus was entirely at the undergraduate level, they had given one Masters degree. Of course now, they have a very very well developed PhD program, very very well developed research program and perhaps equally important, they have got a very very broad subject matter coverage. Not just timber production forestry, which is still very very important, but a lot of environmental aspects, and the Wildlife and Fisheries' aspect. The Mississippi catfish industry came along in the 80s and built the fisheries portion of the Wildlife and Fisheries Department tremendously. So, the thirty years that I have been associated, even though I left the Forestry end of things in 1978, have been exciting to observe. There has been a lot of growth and a lot of positive things happen. You mentioned that they considered it a criticism that you were responsive to the state. How did...exactly how did the Forestry Department interact with tree farmers and industry in the state? I mean you do not have to get into complete detail, but what kind of programs you have? Did you meet with them periodically? How did that work? Well, there are a lot of fortunate things about it. The forestry community in Mississippi has been a very unified community during my time here in great contrast to the adjoining state of Louisiana. Where in Louisiana, the forest industry exists as one category, and the forest landowners exist as another category and they do not talk to each other. They have an antagonist thing and you have one organization for industry and another organization for private citizens. In Mississippi, there has been a great leadership factor in all segments--public and private pull together. The forestry faculty at Mississippi State has served leadership roles in that consortium of common interest. The Dean of Forestry School serves, by law, on the State Forestry Commission, which has got the state agencies, fire protection, and all of the regulatory
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activities as their responsibility. The State Forestry Association has the Dean, the Department Head, and the Vice-President ex officio members of their boards. The Professional Foresters in the state are probably eighty percent graduates of Mississippi State now, and they invite the faculty and the students for field trips and things of that nature. There are now in this state, county forestry associations in sixty-two of the counties I believe, and all of those are receiving leadership from the cooperative extension service from Mississippi State, which means that the forestry specialists and the extensions service, as well as, the forestry faculty are called on to come to the county forestry meetings and give talks and...So, it's a very close knit community. Not as close as it used to be. The world has changed now, but during the early years, there was a leadership group of twenty-five people perhaps, two or three of which would be from Mississippi State, that would be involved in positive public action that was taken--usually with a representative or two from the legislature. The supervisor of the US Forest Service national forests in this state, the state forester, and the chief forester for International Paper Company, Anderson Tully in the delta, and two or three others. MB: RF: Well, lets move on. You changed jobs in 1978, so lets talk about your new position. Right, just to fill in the gaps, I was department head in Forestry from 69 until 71. 71 to 73, I was associate dean and department head. Dean Klap was getting up in years, and he had lost his wife during that time and so, I was moved into the associate deans job and in many ways did a lot of the travel and things that Dean Klap could not do, or did not want to do. I became dean on his retirement in 1973. So, 73 to 78, I was dean of the Forestry School, which meant that the three departments, Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries, and Forest Products reported to me. During that time, I also served as Associate Director of the Agriculture and Forestry Experiment Station, now known as MAFES. Much to my surprise, in 1978, I was chosen to be director of the experiment station. It was surprising because at that time, there had only been one forester who had actually served as director as an agricultural experiment station and he got fired after the first nine months (laughter). There is not a whole lot of common ground between people in forestry and people in row crop agriculture. So, there were many who felt that a forester could not manage an experiment station, an agricultural experiment station. The same people who felt that an agriculturist certainly could manage a forestry program.
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Yeah, sure (laughs). But, at any rate, I became director of the experiment station in 1978 and was director of that unit from 78 to 86. Of course, one reason that I was able to do that, and I think reasonably successfully, was that the early seven years of my career were on a branch experiment station in Louisiana, where I was doing forestry research, but we also did beef cattle research, dairy cattle research, ag economics research, and ag crop research. With a seven person staff, seven scientist staff, you learned what everybody was doing. I learned the vocabulary of agriculture that made it possible for me to move in and at least get over the first hurdle in talking with pure agriculture people. I still have to give a great deal of credit to Louis Wise who had the courage to choose me. Because there were a lot of people on this campus who said that a forester just cannot do that job. Once again, times have changed. There was no search committee. There was no interviews. As a matter of fact, I was on a trip to North Carolina and came home and had a note to see Dr. Wise first thing in morning. I walked across the street from Dorman Hall to Lloyd Ricks, I ran into Walter Porter, who was associate director of the station, who said `congratulations, would you like my letter of resignation?' I said what do you mean? He says, `well you are the director and you out to chose your associate directors and I want you to know that I will resign if you want me to' (laughter). I said I don't even know that I am director, and I am sure not so stupid that I would want you to resign. But, that was the kind of man Walter Porter was. At any rate, I was able to serve as director of the experiment station from 78 to 86. It was some of the best of times and some of the worst of times. We suffered a lot of budget cuts beginning in 1981. We had to so a lot of different things. Some, I think good, some not at all good. At any rate in 1986, Dr. Wise retired and I replaced him as Vice-President for the Division of Agriculture, Forestry, and Veterinary Medicine, which included the Experiment Station, the Extension Service, the then, College of Forestry Resources, the College of Agriculture, and the College of Veterinarian Medicine. I was fortunate to hold that job until June of 1999, when I took retirement and left others to do it. At the time that I moved into that Vice-Presidency, I cannot think of a more humbling experiences, because there had been only two people that held that job prior to me. One was William L. Giles, who was one of the most outstanding individuals that I have ever known. The other was Louis Wise, who equally was outstanding. So, I had some big shoes to fill, and got to participate in a lot of important and interesting things.
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One thing that I think I would like for you to do...I think a lot of people in this state just don't appreciate or maybe just don't know how MAFES operates. You have obviously, the central location is here on campus, but you do have the branches out there. Why don't you just talk about how that whole network functions. Where the different stations are and how it operates. That's a very very good point Mike. It's amazing how many people on this very campus don't understand that the experiment station and the extension service make Mississippi State a statewide institution. In reality, both those organizations probably expend more of their resources off campus than they do on campus. They were not created...I will talk interchangeably about MAFES and MSU Extension. Although the experiment station was the first created. In 1888, the state of Mississippi accepted the provisions of the Hatch Act, which was a Federal deal that provided payments to the states to create agricultural research stations. Interestingly enough, the original author of that bill, the Hatch Act, was Senator George from Mississippi. He introduced it into the Congress in 1870-something. It did not get very far. Then Congressman Hatch from Iowa, I believe, finally got it passed. But, at any rate, it created at the land-grant institution Mississippi State, then ten years old, a federally supported experiment station to do fundamental research into agriculture--problems of the rural areas of the state. The state legislature had to accept that mission by passing a law creating the station. They had to appropriate matching money. So, here was the ten year old Mississippi State College actually, Mississippi A & M, that had to absorb and figure out how to deal with an almost autonomous organization. In the early days, it was pretty much autonomous. The director of the experiment station reported to the president, but they were more or less equals in a lot of ways because the director had money that could only be spent for agricultural research. The president could not use it for anything else. There have been conflicts over that provision from the very beginning. Not at this location, but others. At any rate, this had evolved into what now exists, which is a statewide network. In MAFES, there are ten legislatively created branch experiment stations. Each of which has a statute that says there shall be an experiment station at Crystal Springs to do this that and the other. Many of those...well, lets see. Four of them were created in 1901, and those were almost regional kinds of stations: Holly Springs, Stoneville, Poplarville, and I guess the Macon station...Brooksville were in 1901. At any rate, I may be wrong on that. They operated with those locations until right after World War II, when the Rockefeller Foundation funded a national study, and actually put Rockefeller Foundation money up to assist
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states in creating addition experiment stations. So, six stations were created with Rockefeller funding. They all had the same kind of office buildings. You can still go visit them. They are located in the...well through a compromise of science and politics, they were located where the politicians wanted them to be but in most cases, the universities selected the soil type and the region that would be represented. They represented agriculture of the date that beef cattle at the brown loam in Raymond, cotton at the delta, and things of that nature. In 1914, the Federal government again, passed the Smith-Lever Act, which authorized the land-grant schools to establish county extension programs. The university college had employees created in every county of the state to take the results of the research at the experiment stations and get them applied to the people living on the land. You got to realize that at that time, and really up until World War II, virtually all the people in Mississippi lived in the rural areas and lived on farms. There just were no cities to amount to much. The cities were basically there to process and market the products that came from the farm. Beginning...what eighty-five years ago, I guess, the university here, or college, had a network of employees that covered concentrations at ten branch experiment stations and location in all eighty-two counties. Employees that were charged with agriculture research oriented education, family research or education through the home economics program of the extensions service and youth work, through the 4-H clubs that had been created. The 4-H clubs are celebrating their centennial this year. As a matter of fact, it was celebrated on this campus last week I believe. At any rate, things have changed. The countryside is different. What Mississippi State now has, and one thing that I have got listed as being particularly pleased with and proud of is that we began, along about 1986-87 to consolidate our off-campus activities into four regional research and extension centers. We had one already established at Stoneville in the delta. It was regional from the beginning. There never was another experiment station in the delta. It serves the eighteen delta counties. We created the North Mississippi Extension Center at Verona, just south of Tupelo. We had had a branch extension service there. We got funding from the state for a new facility. We have concentrated our resources, our human resources, there. We still have the branch experiment stations at Pontotoc, and Holly Springs, and Prairie, but we don't have resident scientists at every one of them. We try to concentrate our scientific resources in one location. Le them travel to the branch stations and to other locations to do their research. We followed the North Mississippi Research and Extension Center with the Central Mississippi Research and Extension Center on the campus of Hinds
Community College. That building was completed about two years ago. That provides leadership for the central part of the state, and includes our Coastal Plains Branch Station at Newton, the Crystal Springs Truck Crops Experiment Station, the Brown Loam Station at Raymond. In addition, our land-grant partner at Alcorn State University is very directly involved in the Central Mississippi Research and Extension Center. In 1971, the legislature had created a branch of our experiment station at Alcorn, and provided money to support the hiring of Alcorn State faculty members as researchers in the Mississippi State Extension Service... I mean Research Station and Extension Service actually. That worked very very well up until the late 80s, early 90s when Alcorn had grown its program to the point that they did not want to be a branch of anybody. They asked for separation and we concurred and the legislature created a program at Alcorn. Since central Mississippi includes Alcorn, they participate in the Central Mississippi Research and Extension Service programs at Hinds. We are starting construction...I think they have already started construction, have the money for the South Mississippi Research and Extension Center. It's called the Coastal Research and Extension Center, and will be at Biloxi. It will be the administrative focus for the research program at Richton Mississippi and at Poplarville Mississippi, as well as, a concentration of researchers down on the coast that are comprised of the sea grant researchers of Mississippi State, as well as the land-grant researchers. So, we have got, at those four regional centers, we have got electronic classrooms, connected to Mississippi State and other educational institutions. We have got a concentration of faculty members in appropriate disciplines to provide research and educational services for the activities that are in those regional areas. All those people are faculty members of Mississippi State University. They are under the same rules of operation, have always been that way, however, their initial responsibility is not to the students on the Starkville campus of Mississippi State, it is to the people that live in that region. It takes a little understanding at the administrative level and some other things to work out. One of the...the more difficult it should be the easiest is the university's holiday schedule. It is very very difficult to explain to the cotton farmers in the delta that our employees at the Delta need a spring break, or Dead Day (laughter) or the other kind of calendar things that we need to close down all those... MB: RF: I never thought about those things. It has been particularly difficult with the county agents, because their offices are in the courthouse. The people in the courthouse
know when they come to work and know when they leave, and if they are not there, then they talk about them. (laughter) Yet, the...you cannot have one class of employees working on a different work schedule form the rest of the employees. So, we have to deal with that and a lot of other things, but in general, the off-campus people are as loyal to Mississippi State and are as supportive to the total program at Mississippi State as any group you will ever see. MB: Well, I...one thing...a couple of other things we can talk about, but I just thought it might be good if you could look back over your career here, and maybe do an overview; obviously, we don't have time to get into every little specific detail, at the changes in technology. What has been the greatest impact on Mississippi in general? And maybe beyond, because what happens here, happens elsewhere. It is mind-boggling to think of the changes and beyond that to try to think of what caused them, or think back to the things that have happened. Of course, agriculture, forestry, activities, enterprises that we have supported are part of the global economy and they behave--they respond to global changes. I am not sure many people of today realize the transformation that has taken place in the countryside of the state of Mississippi. Really not in my time necessarily, it was well underway in 1969. One statistic that has stuck in my mind very very deeply is that Leake County south of us, Carthage is the county seat, was one of the most heavily farmed counties in the state in the early years of this century; all small farms, people...Harperville, and Madden, and Lena, communities Walnut Grove...in 1946, there were fourteen high schools in Leake County, Mississippi. They played a basketball tournament every year that was beyond comprehension and I would have loved to have seen it. The whole county shut down and everybody came to wherever the tournament was. Those were community high schools that there were enough people with kids in a twenty-mile radius or less to support a high school. Leake County has two high schools now. Three maybe, two or three. I think they have two public and one private. I think is right. The exodus post-World War II from the family farm to industry, education, all the kind of things that people do, has completely changed the political, social, and enterprise activities in the state. Interestingly enough, we still produce as much cotton today as we did in 1930 or whenever the peak for cotton acreage in the state. Mississippi used to have ten million acres of cotton. We now have
RF:
MB: RF:
a million acres of cotton, but we are producing the same number of bales on a million acres that we used to produce on ten. The same thing is true for any of the commodities that you wish to think about: dairy production, milk per cow is easily ten times what it was prior to World War II. All of the traditional commodities have increased in efficiency through a variety of different technologies. Interestingly enough, one enterprise that emerged as important after the war and has declined since then is beef cattle production. The initial response by the rural people here and elsewhere, when they gave up row crops, was to plant pastures and get beef cattle. In the mid-70s, the beef cattle industry in this state was a very thriving business. It was everywhere you looked, and it was expected to continue to grow. For one reason or another, beef cattle production has not developed the technology that has made it more efficient. Per capita consumption of beef has gone down. Poultry industry came on the scene. It went from backyard flocks that people grew their own chicken meat to a very technologically advanced system. They have replaced beef cattle in the economic and political spotlight. Now, we really have a very small beef cattle industry. It has shown some signs of reviving here lately. There has been a tremendous shift. Forest increase--there is a lot of the land that was in farming, in the small farms that is now in forest product. Still most of it in private landowners. The kinds of things that have made the greatest impact are mechanization to begin with, the tractor, the combine, and they get bigger and bigger every year. That did not really come on board until after World War II. You had a few tractors, but mostly animal power prior to that time. So, that was the first revolution was bringing in petroleum power, instead of animal power. The next was the chemical revolution in first fertilizer, and second, pesticides. Fertilizer, most people today do not realize what a difference that has made, but many people...my parents farmed and they did not know what fertilizer was when they started farming, and their yields showed it (laughters). Now, the technology of providing nutrients is very well developed. Probably the one that nonstudents of the field don't understand as well is weed control. In the humid south, particularly in the delta, mechanization was not really possible until weed control became possible with chemicals, because you still had to have people with hoes out there chopping cotton. If you had to have them to chop the cotton, you might as well keep them to pick the cotton. MB: RF: Yeah. Because you had to have that labor force. There was not way to control weeds except through manual labor, through running
tractors back and forth with cultivators, and it was labor intensive. When they discovered chemicals that would control weeds, it completely changed the labor requirements for farming. Then, yields got boosted further by insect technology, up to and including the boll weevil eradication, which is having its impact right now, hitting cotton production. But, the chemical revolution was followed by the computer revolution, the information revolution. [END TAPE 1, SIDE A] RF: Beginning in the 1960s, when Watson and Krick discovered the nature of DNA, the science and disciplines of biology have been transforming themselves. It is now Biotechnology. It really is what I like to call the new Biology, because we have just learned a lot more and we have the tools to learn a lot more about the way plants and animals' function, and their needs and their capabilities. The first application in agriculture, widespread of those technologies, was in diary production with bovine sumatatropin? (10), which was a biotechnology-derived injection that increased milk production. That has had an impact; a tremendous impact on the diary industry nationally. Unfortunately, it has had a very negative impact on the dairy industry in this state, because we had a state that was based on many many small dairies. Turns out bovine samatatropin? works on any cow, but on the very highly managed cows with high technology dairies, your benefits are much higher than they are in the low management situation. So, we have now seen the milk industry in the United States dominated by very very large dairy farms, concentrated in the desert areas of New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California. Very Very large, 1500 cows diaries, where we have 100 cow dairies. We have only one such dairy in this state, in Hinds County. It seems inevitable that we will have a few very very large dairy operations, and that has been difficult because the dairy farms have been the last of the true family farms. That is where momma and dad and all the kids work on the farm and they made pretty good money, it was a profitable business until technology has now brought it to the point that it needs to be much much larger. Mush of that is due to marketing. A lot of it is due to technology. At any rate, moving from the BST, the next technology to impact Mississippi agriculture was the genetic manipulation and modification of planting seed. Scientists learned fifteen years ago and perfected no more than ten years ago, probably closer to six, the ability to insert genetic material from one species into another. Thereby, introducing traits that could not be done before. The two that have revolutionized Mississippi agriculture is so-called BT cotton. That
is cotton that has had a gene from a bacteria, bacillus therungexus? inserted into the cotton plant. The bacteria makes a poison that kills butterflies, or kills the larva of butterflies. Now, you can plant a cotton seed that will result in a cotton plant that when a tobacco budworm or cotton bollworm, larva starts eating on it, the larva will die. Its got its own protection. Concurrently with that, there are technology firms, mostly private firms, have developed genes to be inserted in soybeans, corn, and other crops that make them impervious to a particular herbicide, which means that you can plant a seed that will produce a plant that you can spray with a weed killer and it wont hurt the plant, but it will kill everything else there, which makes for the ideal weed control. It has just completely transformed the weed control thing. Now, this is just the beginning. I am very proud that through leadership of Mac Portera and others, mostly since I left, and through gifts from the _________(59)? Foundation, that Mississippi State now has an institute for Biotechnology and Life Sciences. I think that _________? just gave them two million dollars not too far back. That is where the action is today and is going to be in the future. The opportunity to manipulate growth processes, to accomplish things that man wants to accomplish are just unlimited right now. Very exciting to think about it. One thing that I want to get to, and I guess that I will do this on a separate thing... the one thing of all the things that I have been privileged to participate in, that is absolutely unique to Mississippi and to Mississippi State is the catfish industry. MB: RF: MB: Ok. And I want to do that. I want to give you a long load on that because it is fascinating. We will pick up with that one next week. June 25, 2002 interview continues. I think we quit last time when you were getting ready to expound on the catfish industry. So, you can take off with that. Yeah, I think its good to look at the evolution of the catfish industry as an example of the way the university and the private sector can make a real difference. The fortunate thing about my career is that I came here prior to the beginning even of the vestiges or beginnings of a catfish industry and was positioned by the jobs that I held to be knowledgeable about what was going on. The actual farming of fish has been a dream for a lot of people for a long long time. Of course, it is widely done in Asian cultures, but in ways that do not really fit with our system. About the late 1960s, several things seemed to happen in Mississippi agriculture
RF:
that pushed innovators to looking for new ways to do business. Interestingly enough, the catfish industry had its birth...it's debatable point (laughter) as to where the first catfish pond was, but there were a few innovators in the Mississippi Delta, but there was a concentration of people around Laurel, Mississippi who had been influenced by research that had been down at Auburn, and Alabama farmers across the line that were trying to catfish. Interestingly enough, one of those innovators was Charles Pickering, the current judge whose son is in the legislature in the Congress. The Pickering family was one of the earlier families in the catfish business and Charles Pickering was one of the first presidents, if not the first president, of the Catfish Farmers of Mississippi. At any rate, in 1973 as I recall, two or three, there was a happening that normally would not have been noticed in that sardines, a small fish that provide most of the fish meal used in animal feed, did not return to the coast of Peru. There was a El Nino or something. The price of fish meal went very very high. Well, Purina Food Company, er Feed Company was providing catfish feed. They just put a label on it and called it catfish feed. It was really a kind of a standard animal feed. They, looking at the bottom line costs, said we really can't afford to put fishmeal in the catfish food; we will put some plant protein that will substitute for it. So, the few fish farmers bought from Purina. Fed their fish all summer long. Harvested that fall and the fish were the same size that they had been when they put them in, because fish have a nutrient requirement that they have to have of a certain amount of animal protein in the feed, and the feed did not have it (laughter). So, I was assistance director of the experiment station at the time for Forestry, Wildlife, and Fisheries. Under the fisheries end of things, all of a sudden there was a room full of catfish farmers in Dorman Hall on this campus, saying, "Mississippi State has got to do something about this. The experiment station needs to activate the Animal Nutrition Committee," which I had never heard of and it had not been used for years and years and years. In the early days of Mississippi State, if you read the history, some of the first things they did was to do research into the kind of feed that dairy cows needed. Over the years, they had developed a group of faculty members that were called the Nutrition Committee. They actually had legal status to recommend to the State Commissioner of Agriculture the standards for animal feed that could be sold in the state. So, I convened the Nutrition Committee. Luckily, Dr. Ben Barintine? , who was head of the Department of Biochemistry at the time, had been...previously worked in a service laboratory that the experiment station had called Ag Chem lab that did analysis of these things, and he was very knowledgeable about what needed to be done. I knew nothing. At any rate, we paneled
a group of faculty members and some research was begun here. Really, it only took a review of literature to find out what had happened to the other thing. At any rate, Mississippi State got involved and the first thing was to determine the nutrient requirements of catfish. Dr. Bob Wilson in biochemistry is now internationally know for his work. First person to determine the amino acid requirements in the diet of catfish. At any rate, it was really an example of the expectation that are placed on Mississippi State. It was part of our job to do this. It was expected that we do that. If they had gone to another institution, they would have said, "Why are you here?" (laughter) You know. We had a cadre of people that just automatically accepted that it was necessary. We began, at that point, in trying to put together a research team that could work with this new industry and we were lucky enough in about 1977 or 8 to get a special appropriation to hire two researchers and put them at the Delta station in Stoneville, and start working with the industry. Our Department of Food Science with Dr. Gail Amerman? did some research that without it, the industry could not have moved ahead. He determined the basic data that goes on the label about the percent that and the percent this and the basic constituents of the food. Dr. John Waldruff in Ag Economics, who was a resource economist, had worked in regular agricultural areas, took a great interest and he developed a experiment station bulletin on the cost and returns for farming catfish. That book...that bulletin has been cited by many many people as the most single contributory factor to the growth of the catfish industry because it allowed the catfish farmers to go to their banks, and borrow money. It was developed in the same format that they used for row crops and other things. It was a budget. The farm loan officers could understand that. They started loaning money. Mostly in the Mississippi delta because the interest down in Laurel had sort of subsided, and the flat land and the abundant water resources in the delta led the industry to development there. The results are well know now. We have got the only really well developed food system that is based on a wild animal. There never has been previous to the Mississippi farm raised catfish activity, and instance where animals were taken directly from the wild, and put into cultivation and presented as a year round food supply for people. All of the other animals that we depend on were domesticated by people in prehistory, and went through thousands of years of adaptation...course the catfish is now going through a very rapid genetic development through research. Over at Stoneville, we have the largest concentration of aquaculture research scientists in the United States-- Federal and State. There is the Thad Cochran Warm Water Aquaculture Center there. That is a model for the research. It has grown now to where it is our
largest, behind poultry, our largest animal agriculture activity...above beef cattle and dairy cattle and swine. We have been raising cows and pigs for a long long time...but, throughout the development, the industry and the people here at Mississippi State have been just intertwined. One of my favorite stories is a fellow named Tom Slau?, who used to be a math professor on this campus, married into a delta family and ended up being a catfish farmer in the early years. He is now in the ready-mix concrete business in Jackson, but Tom is very proud of the fact, that in the early 70s, he offered to give a ride in his airplane to director Jim Anderson of the experiment station. Got him up in a small plane and about 5,000 feet, put the plane on autopilot, leaned over to him and put his hand on the exit door that Anderson was sitting right there and said, "Dr. let's talk about some catfish research." (Laughter) Sure enough, that was when some of the positions were redescribed so that people started working on catfish. That is the kind of thing that can be told over and over again. The agriculture and forest interest in this state expect something from Mississippi State. It is part of the job in their mind, and I guess in the legislatures mind as well since they continue to appropriate funds. MB: How did this impact... in the delta especially, how did this impact other crops, because I always thought the catfish farming was much less risky to farmers than the other crops that they planted because it did not depend so much on the weather and other factors. Well, the...it has been a real interesting sociological phenomenon. For many years, people have tried new crops in the delta. Vegetable crops is the most notable. About every ten years, somebody goes into the vegetable business big. It does not last very long. Usually in...the story is that the Mississippi delta farmer only wants to work during the summer time, doesn't want to work during the winter time, doesn't want to get involved in a production system that is twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They are custom to their cotton and... it is a cultural kind of thing. Well, a former colleague, Dr. Walter Porter, who used to be superintendent of the delta station, and was the assistant director of MAFES here, said all along that is hogwash. There is just not enough money in those other things to interest those people. Those people do whatever they can make money at doing. Sure enough, catfish came along, and it proved to be that way. Now there is an interesting thing about catfish in the delta. The pioneers of the catfish industry were not the leaders of the cotton, soybean, and rice industry. There were what I call the "second sons." They were people who were maybe the son of the postmaster or
RF:
someone that did not inherit a lot of land, whose family did not have a lot of land. Some were small farmers, but mostly they were college trained people who did not fit...did not have the resources to get into the plantation economy. They would gamble. They could take a chance, and it was very risky the first five years. The markets were not proven. Production was more predictable. Although during the early years, before diseases were understood, there were a lot of failures. Still, that early group proved the system. They worked it put to where it became less risky and once they had done that, the traditional leader moved in and basically took it over. The same people who dominated cotton production dominate catfish production...just about, not entirely. It has had a lot of economic and social changes. Probably the major thing was the creation of factory work in places that previously had no options for anyone to earn wages working inside a building. The catfish processing industry...I don't know what the current figures are, but the last I heard were 4,000 people, and I am sure that it is more than that now. These are...they are not the best jobs in the world, but they are jobs in a place where there were no jobs. MB: RF: Right, right. They are mostly held by black females, who had no employment opportunities in the geographic areas in which they live. That has made a tremendous difference in building a black middle class in the delta. I think that as years go on, the sons and daughters of those families that had a steady income coming in--granted that two minimum wages incomes is not a whole lot--but, I think that those young people are going to move a step up the ladder, and we will see the delta move along. The catfish industry is by no means at its peak yet. Per capita consumption of fish products is increasing. Catfish is still at the very top of the list; that is under the control of American interest. I was told just a week or so ago that all of the aquaculture production of salmon, which if you notice you can see a lot of salmon in the grocery store now. It is all produced in nets in the harbors and _______? of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. All that production is controlled by one Norwegian firm--every pound of it. They are going to hold back production to a level that will allow them to make a large profit. The catfish industry will be like most other American industries, very competitive. As research allows them to be more productive, the prices will come down and it will be a source of economical and very good food for the people.
MB:
What other aspects of aquaculture has the university been involved with? I remember at one time, they were talking the domestic production of shrimp and some other areas other than catfish. Yeah. We had interest in...and I forget just the exact year, but legislature made available funding for alternative aquaculture species. There was a feeling and still is, that the industry would be more stable if they had options where they could rotate crops and depend on different markets. We did not analysis. A lot of that was led by Dr. A.D. Seal, who was associate director of the experiment station during that period. Our original thought was to encourage the aquacultural production of saltwater shrimp, which is the kind of shrimp that most Americans eat. But, as we...we visited Corpus Christi, Texas, which is the center of American shrimp aquaculture. Then, took a close look at the Mississippi Gulf Coast and decided that we really did not have the land resource there adjacent to the salt water to grow man shrimp. Our coastal resources are very limited compared to Texas. So we chose freshwater shrimp, interestingly enough, because of some consultants from Yosheva? University in Israel, because they are very very prominent in shrimp production...freshwater shrimp production in Israel. We hired some of the brightest young faculty members that we have ever had at Mississippi State. One is still here getting all kinds of awards, _____ _____, who had is doctorate from Yale, who was and still is a very very productive individual. The freshwater shrimp is a, in global terms, significant part of the food system. There are some...it is a very difficult animal to breed and grow. Once you get the baby shrimp to put into a pond, you have got pretty well and easy crop to grow, but getting the shrimp to breed in captivity and handling the microscopic little animals is a very high tech business. Lou and his associates pretty well perfected a system of shrimp production for the lower south area. It has not completely taken off yet. Primarily because a high development of technology sort of parallelled the globalization of the economy of the world. We are now getting aquaculture-raised shrimp from Asia, particularly Red China at a price that we cannot compete with. The shrimp that you eat mostly is coming from there now. Most of it is saltwater shrimp, because they have abundant marshes and they are able to grow the saltwater species. You do see the freshwater shrimp on the grocery store shelves occasionally. As I read in the paper, there is an organization, a corporation, in south Mississippi that intends to build a nursery to produce the seed stock. That is the key element. If we ever have availability of seed stock at a reasonable price, the cultivation, harvest, and sale of the product is very very good. It does suffer from the difficulty that it requires
RF:
water temperature above fifty-five degrees, which means when it gets along about October--November in Starkville, you better be ready to harvest your crop or they will all die(laughter). That puts the whole crop on the market all on the same day, which causes difficulty with marketing. The thing about catfish that makes it so attractive is that you can harvest 365 a year. They can transport the catfish to the processing plant alive, which is a guarantee of freshness. If you have an aquatic animal that can not be harvested and maintained alive to the processing plant, you bring it in on ice, and nobody knows how long it has been on that ice for sure. Therefore, the processor cannot afford to pay as high a price knowing that some of it, when they get to processing, it will be spoiled. So, its little things like that have contributed to the catfish thing. MB: I want to ask you a question about catfish that I have always wondered about as a boy fishing in the Big Black River in north Choctaw County. We caught mudcat was what they were called. Of course, over in the Grenada reservoir and other places, they were different color and called channel cat. What exactly is the difference? They are different species of animals. Just about like the difference between a red ear brim and chinquapin brim or whatever. They will interbreed if you force them to. No, they are the blue channel cat, and I forget all the different species, but... Now, the farm raised catfish... The farm raised catfish is a channel cat. There are some uses...some hybrids coming out now that apparently have some benefits and some advantages. I don't know exactly how many species of catfish there are; there are a number of them. We recently had a pretty good political controversy over Vietnamese catfish that had been coming in. They are not really a catfish at all. Although they look a whole lot like a catfish. They don't taste like one. Yeah, I been hearing Paul Lot on his radio show...complaints about that. Well, is there any other...we had...this was the next in a series of comments that you have been making on changes in agriculture in the state during your career. Is there anything else that you want to add before we go on? Well, yes. I guess one thing that...we touched on catfish. We have touched on computers. We have touched on biotechnology, I
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MB:
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think. Two other things that have been very very major, and will be more so in the future. The first to hit was what I label privatization. I am talking about privatization of research and education and service that used to be provided by Mississippi State. Now, it has been absorbed by the private sector. It has been a traumatic experience in a lot of ways. We have a very large building on this campus called the Pace Seed? Technology Laboratory. Mississippi State was internationally known and prominent in the seed technology business, which was a combination of the biology and engineering of processing seeds, but more importantly it was...we provided leadership in organizing the seed production activities of farmers because the traditional pattern of row crop agriculture followed in the gulf south particularly, and really nationwide, was that the public agencies, the state or the federal agencies did the genetic work and developed the variety of cotton or whatever, and provided, almost at cost and in many cases subsidized, the foundation seed to private seed growers who would then grow the crop under inspection by Mississippi State or the State Department of Agriculture. Then, the farmer would sell that seed under certification process that was run by a committee or.... It was very well developed in Mississippi, and we were know for our ability to produce good seed. We sold seed everywhere. A sack of seed corn is worth a whole lot more that a sack of corn that you are going to feed a chicken. Well, it was too much of a good thing. There was enough money to be made in seed production that during my time here, I have seen seed production almost entirely captured by commercial firms, by multinational firms. The most uniquely identified with Mississippi, I guess is the cottonseed market. I read in this morning's paper that Delta Pine and Land Company Scott, Mississippi, has seventy percent of the cottonseed market worldwide. They produce seventy percent of the cottonseed. They do so under their own patents with limited involvement from public sector. We cooperate with them. Delta Pine and Land has contributed money to the university, and I believe the library has the papers from when they were in the farming business. But, the same thing has happened with weed control and with insect control. Agriculture now is less dependent on farmer to farmer sales and co-ops and all the structures that socially bond together farmers, has been modified, I guess, to meet the realities of today's economic world to where they buy and they buy by the same methods as any other consumer buys. They buy things that are advertised. Things that a sales staff convinces people to buy. That is very different from what used to be. We used to have monstrous crowds come to the branch experiment stations to look at variety trials, where we would plant all of the different kinds of soybean
seed developed by the different states and everything. Farmers would make their decisions based on what the experiment station had in the variety trials. That has been tremendously changed because now the market is just different. You see it advertised on TV, or the sales representatives... I visited the world's largest corn seed company in Iowa not too many years back. They said they had 4,700 sales representatives in the United States selling corn seed. It was interesting to me because there are only 4,000 agriculture county agents in the United States that are hired by the government to give advice to farmers. So you have got a choice to whether you take your advice from a civil servant or from a salesman who is equipped with a laptop and has a hat to give away, and all kinds of things (laughter). So, privatization has made a very great difference and will make an even greater difference in agriculture in the future. Whereas Mississippi State used to raise bulls to sell. We don't do that anymore. We used to have a lot of things that we were quasi-in business to do, because somebody had to do it. Well, now the private sector is more that willing to do it. In many instances, they do an excellent job and in some instances, it is not to the best interest to particularly Mississippi. As long as the State of Mississippi was doing, there was a willingness to go a little extra. What we have developed I think and will continue to do, is that we will try to see those news industries that the private sector cannot afford to deal with or more importantly, the niche industries, the markets that are to small for the big companies. The big seed companies now are saying that they can't afford to do research on crops that are not planted in such volume that they can get their money back. Basically, I think that they are seven crops that they can deal with. That does not include sweet potatoes. Does not include okra. Does not include a lot of things that people eat. So, I think that we will be working on new crops and niche market crops. The other innovation that has changed tremendously since I have been in this business is the environmental consequences of what we do in the land. Prior to about 19, really 65, there was really very little concern about the environment. It just was not factored in. Now the general public is very much attuned. In agriculture and forestry, there is just nothing that isn't influenced by potential impact on the environment. It is a variable thing from location to location. It has a tremendous impact. It is in the environmental side of things that Mississippi State again becomes of ultimate importance. The private sector is not going to provide leadership in environmental management research because there is relatively little way to make a profit doing that. So, it seems to me as a state agency, we need to be ahead of the game doing research on environmental consequences--positive and negative--to keep our producers and landowners and general
public producing and enjoying environment that Mississippi has. I think that that is one of the real opportunities that we can take. Mississippi has a wonderfully clean environment compared to most everywhere. If we can capitalize on that... I think something of great value. MB: I wanted to ask you a question. Senator McCain said yesterday on the news that some of the problems with the wild fires that they are having in Arizona...Senator John McCain of Arizona was that environmentalists had filed to many lawsuits to prevent the burning of underbrush at certain times of the year, so that if a fire came along, it could be better controlled. I know in my own home county of Choctaw that periodically in the National Forest around there, they do burn the underbrush. So, you mentioned environmentalism can have, I guess in that respect, a negative impact. Oh, no question about it. We have had...I think most knowledgeable people would say...I'm talking about scientifically knowledgeable and people who understand the history, that we have gone entirely too far in many many parts of the world. In many parts of the United States. I don't know about the world. In attributing natural to neglect. We have tremendous fuel loads now, all through the western national forest, through many of the southern forests, for different reasons, that have accumulated all of this flammable material that makes it very very difficult to control those fires. We could have the same kind of situation in parts of Mississippi. I think the severity of the last several seasons of fires have changed the public policy. If you look at the last year's appropriation to the Forest Service, they appropriated a 100% increase to allow them to begin a fuel reduction thing. The Los Alamos fires were the ones that I think really got people because there was no reason for that to have happened. It should have been prevented. Forest fire is another thing about Mississippi that is worth another tape or two. I am not the key person in that, but forest fire has made a tremendous...has had an impact on how this state has grown up, particularly in south Mississippi where there never were the small farmers there were in Choctaw County. Out west there are two things that have happened. One is they have prevented the slash disposal and prescribed burning that used to go on. Third, they have stopped road building and in fact caused some roads to be torn up to mean that you can not get a bull dozer in to put the fire out with. In those circumstances, you really have no choice but to let it burn. With people living out in the forest now...that is what gets peoples attention. It is not the woods burning, it is the cabins. So that is a whole new issue and
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something that would be, I think, good to capture is the impact of woods burning as far as fires, particularly in south Mississippi. There are some good books out on that. [End Tape 1, Side B] [Begin Tape 2, Side A] MB: Ok, the final section that we are going to cover here are the...we have it listed on our program interview sheet as social changes and changes in general at MSU, and that would include academic. Why don't we just combine those and you can just comment on the social and academic changes that you have observed during your years here at the campus? Really besides the physical changes on the campus, the buildings and all of that, the changes that I have observed on campus are social changes. It would be very difficult to rank these in order, but I have four thing that came to mind immediately that just completely changed the entire environment--racial integration has got to be very high, gender equity has got to be very very high, urbanization of the student body in the state, and related to that but much larger is what I call the death of the cow college. That death of the cow college thing is an incendiary kind of thing. It includes a whole raft of institution changes that have been made in light of the social changes. Course the racial integration thing is something in my mind that Mississippi State can be exceptionally proud of. I have had experiences at a lot of southern institutions and I feel confident in saying that Mississippi State has handled this very difficult transition as well or better than any. When I came here in 1969, we had a hand full of black students. It was a very very small hand full. I can't recall when the first one came here was 65 or 66 or something like that? I was here in when the first black athletes were recruited, when the first black faculty members were hired, when the first black was elected student body president, and all the other things. While it has in no means been perfect, and I don't know of anyone that claims perfection in this, people who were instrumental in that can be very very proud of the way the institution has absorbed and welcomed this change. I think our student body today is not as completely indicative of the total population of the state, but it is fast approaching that. Close, yeah. We have some of the finest black students that anybody could ever have. So, that is one that I don't need to expound on, but it is something. Gender equality has in many ways had an identical
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kind of an activity. The co-eding of the university had begun significantly before I got here. By the time I got here, it was pretty far along. It has made a tremendous difference. Of course, it has mirrored the changes in the world of work. We no longer have traditional female work and male work. It has made a great difference in the classroom and the outlook of the campus and of course the world around us--all for the better. MB: RF: I have noticed the really large numbers of female graduates in veterinarian medicine. Well, that is national trend. It is going even more rapidly than most people would prefer. Yes, it is well over half now, sixty percent. In some colleges, up to seventy and eighty percent. It is an indication of the interest of many many young ladies in dealing with animals and the fact that it is a highly selective field, the young ladies have brought more to the table when it comes to admissions to the colleges. Same thing is true in other fields throughout: engineering, whatever. There are no longer any dominant male field. Now, agriculture has been less rapidly assimilated in many regards, particularly at the faculty level. Part of that is kind of a social thing. It will go away. The gender equity is something that has made a tremendous difference on this campus, and tying it to the racial thing, something that many people do not stop to realize. I have said it over and over again. In 1964, I believe, you can check it, the enrollment of Mississippi State was somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,000 white males. In 1999, the enrollment of Mississippi State was something like 7,000 white males. All the growth in enrollment that had taken place has been in females and other races. People take that for granted now, but just think if we had been allowed to stay, or forced to stay, as an all-boys school. What would we be like today? It blows your mind. Urbanization thing is a very real thing. When I came here in 69, every student basically had at least a grandfather and many of them has fathers who were employed in farming, or from the country. They might not have been farming, but they lived in the country at any rate. They were rural. Now, the typical student does not have a grandfather on the farm anymore. They are further removed from that. It has had an impact on the student body. The students majoring in agriculture have to be taken on a field trip to see what a farm is. Whereas in years past, that was not necessary. It is also brought all the differences in outlook and expectations that an urban situation presents as compared to the rural population. There are pluses and minuses. Generally speaking, the rural young people are more generalist, they are broader, they experience more things, because
they went to a small school and they had to participate in everything. The urban students are more specialized. They have had opportunities and they have chosen those things and have been able to become better public speakers or whatever they wanted to be. So that has made a difference. The demise of the cow college is something that a lot of people, a lot of current alumni are upset about. They have been for twenty or thirty years because at the time, this was the cow college that people talk about and read about. Post-World War II years really, up until the mid-60s, agriculture and agriculture related things were the dominant thing that happened. People were kind of proud of it. The cow college was new to being a plus. In the 70s, 80s, and 90s, it gradually became not a positive thing. Being known as the cow college was not something that people wanted. The university changed, as it should have and became much more diverse; much more like other universities. There are still people who have a hard time coming to grips with that. People who were here when the president of the student body always came from the ag school, and things of that nature. That is not the world that we are in. Another thing that not necessarily was related to the cow college component, but I think probably had something to do with the leadership being changed from what it was, is that changes in university governance and the entire operation of the university that have accompanied this change from the cow college to the modern comprehensive university that we are now. When I came here, I interviewed with four people. Now, we have got presidential candidates interviewing today that will interview 40,000 people probably. Department heads and faculty members being considered for employment go through a week long exposure to many many committees. The choice of hiring or not hiring is generally defuse. There is no real boss, top down kind of mentality. There was in the cow college. When it was cow college it was the president hired the vice-presidents. The vice-presidents hired the deans. The deans hired the department heads. The department heads hired the faculty. The loyalty was in that order. You could hire them and you could fire them. Well, that is no longer part of the equation in this university or any other. It makes a tremendous difference in the way in which business is done. That to me is probably the greatest difference, and one that I never quite got used to (laughter). I grew up and people of my age generally grew up in a hierarchical environment where there was a boss and you got ahead in life by doing what your boss wanted you to. That is not the case in the modern university. As a matter of fact, in many instances, what the boss wants you to do is not necessarily in your individual self-interest. So, people don't do it. We used to have, and it was very obvious, the mechanisms that existed. When I first
became a dean, with Dr. Giles as president, we had an administrative council and an academic council, both of which had to vote on changes in the curriculum. The administrative council dealt with things like roads and streets and houses and things that the academic council. The academic council was composed of the deans and a few other people. They had to...all the deans had to vote in order for one of the deans to change the curriculum. It was a very...some great debates in there. It kept everybody aware of what everyone else was doing. In more cases supporting of it. It is ever passed, everybody was for it. That move to an executive council of vice-presidents doing the voting under other presidents notably McComas and Zacharius. Then under Portera, it moved to the president making the decisions (laughter). Those are just management kinds of things, but they have a tremendous impact on the people approach their day to day-by-day work. There are people today concerned about who will be the next president even though they will probably see that person once a year and not truly be impacted directly that much by what that person does. At any rate, the university governance, obviously the faculty is much more involved than they were at promotion and tenure. That used to be a very very strong top down process as a matter of fact. I came here without tenure being mentioned to me. I did not ask and nobody said. Four years later, I got a letter from the president saying that I had been granted tenure. I never applied for (laughter) tenure. It was just a decision that the administration made as to who got tenure. Most everybody did. Of course now, it's a very very involved process. Very complicated. MB: RF: Complicated. The net result of these kinds of changes...well, I guess one other thing that I ought to say is of getting back to the demise of the cow college. I should have said, and the positive way to say it is the growth of the comprehensive university. Prior to the mid-60s, agriculture was the only place you could get a PhD here. Agriculture was the only place research was done, because there was research money available to do that. Yeah. As it has been described to me, and had I observed it when I came here even in 1969. The non-agriculture part of the campus was pretty well and undergraduate college. Education gave higher degrees, and I guess most everybody got authorized to give PhDs in the early seventies, late sixties. There really was not much in the way of research. I give great great credit to Chester McKee for
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bringing this university into a comprehensive research program. One thing that I want to get on the record that not many people are aware of is that Louis Wise, the vice-president for agriculture was the strongest supporter of Chester McKee in this activity because he recognized that it would not be healthy for agriculture to continue to be the only place that had anything. We would be better off if the rest of the university could come up to our standards. If they could not, we would probably brought down to theirs. So, the early money to build a research capacity came from the ag side without much known about it to enable the university to build a research capacity. The computing business is the best way example. The first computer that Mississippi State ever got was paid for by the Business Affairs department and the Ag Department, but it was used very very heavily by the research compliment in math and engineering. The money did not come from there, but the recognition was that it needed to be, whether the university needed to have a computer. That was the only way it was going to get one. Of course, the same computer wrote the checks and did everything else. The growth of research in Biological Sciences, Engineering, Education, the Sciences in Arts and Sciences has obviously been one of the major major transformation on this campus while I have been here and it is all for the better. It is a wonderful wonderful thing. The ag people, at least leadership, understood that was to their advantage to have that and have supported it. There is always been and I guess always will be some jealousy between the faculty in agriculture and the faculty that is outside. One of the things that has bothered me. I completely failed to make an impact on is...I think it is ridiculous that we have two kinds of faculty members-- ninemonth faculty and twelve-month faculty. That presents a division and a great amount of confusion that just ought not to be there. They ought to be all the same. My bias is that they all ought to be twelve-month, because there is plenty of work to do. Then I have always been a twelve-month employee. Many many of the ninemonth faculty do not want to be twelve-month even though they would like to make more money, which is what they see the twelve-month faculty doing is making more money. That is one of the internal things that was a frustration. The changes outside of the ones that I have already talked about that seem to me to be worth mentioning is that the horizons that Mississippi State as an institution have recognized have expanded tremendously in the time that I have been here. I may have said earlier, but I will say it again. It is something that I have heard over the years, and it does not need to be forgotten--I was told that before Dean Colvard came here as president in 61, the attitude on the Mississippi State campus was, "we can't afford to do things right. We don't have
the money." When he left five years later, the attitude on this campus was, "we can't afford not to do things right." Apparently that man had enough of a vision and strength of leadership quality to convince the campus to make a turn around. Of course, he hired a group of vice-presidents who stayed in the vice-presidency from the early sixties to the early eighties. Those people need to be recognized--John Bettersworth, Louis Wise, T. K. Martin, J.C. McKee, particularly those four. Bob Jones came in...he was a latecomer to that process in Student Affairs. The Vice-President for Business Affairs through most of the growth years was Louis Mallory. MB: RF: Right. That position...that was a support position. The ones that really bought in and changed this university were Bettersworth, Martin, Wise, and McKee. They worked with each other for twenty-years. It was the joy of my life working under them. Mississippi State did not have a procedural manual. We did not have a policy manual. If you wanted to know what you could do, if you did not know, you would call one of those four people. All four of them would give you the same answer. You did not have any...there was never any in-fighting amongst them, other than the normal kind of joking around. Yeah. In terms of where they were and what they wanted, they were firmly joined at the hip. Much of what this university is a result of that twenty years of stability at the vice-presidential level. During that time, we had Colvard, Giles, McComas, and part of Zacharias; particularly, the first three. Very very different presidents, very different, all three of them. But, the basic day-by-day existence and vision of this university stayed the same and they did expand their horizons. They looked at what we could be rather than what we couldn't be. Right. Now, the...obviously the number of majors and all of those kind of things are in the record. You can count the graduates and you can see the growth the has taken place during that time. But, throughout it all, I guess the thing that I am the most thankful for is that this institution still has the same personality that it had when I came here thirty years ago. It's an amazing thing. There is no real excuse for it...no reason for it that I know. But, the general
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expectation on this campus is that the student is going to come first. No matter where the money comes from, no matter what the bosses say, the faculty and the secretaries and the library staff and everybody recognizes and really enjoys the fact that we are here because of the students. That is there. It is still there just like it was. It makes this place, I think, what it is. The other thing is that there is a very deep appreciation for the contributions of individuals here. I have seen instances of people being treated with less respect than they should have but they are very rare. By and large, this is an institution that values those who work together and there has been a great deal of honesty in the management. I think that reflects the state we live in, the nature of the people who come through here, and I hope that it is so deeply entrenched that it will stay that way. MB: I want to get your comment...maybe we can wrap it up with this. I guess, I have been around here for a goodly number of years too. I guess President McComas was the one who really began to emphasize arts, and maybe the Arts and Sciences aspect of the university. Yet, it is observation that we still have the basic personality we were founded on. That is that engineering and agriculture still are what we are known for basically. Not really to the detriment of the other departments. They have grown too, but it seems we have managed somehow to hang on to land-grant status that is our roots. Well, yeah. Although it is a difficult thing to quantify. I guess the thing that I think drives it is that the...again, the student body, the undergraduate student body is the dominant force. Undergraduate student body at Mississippi State, in my judgement, comes here to prepare themselves to make a better living than their mommy and daddy did. That is different that a lot of other institutions. A lot of of institutions the students come there for intellectual breadth and maturity. Because, mommy and dad made more money than they needed, therefore it is not a driver. The question about what are you going to do when you get out of school is not the dominant question on many campuses. It is on this one even today. I think so. It reflects the state of Mississippi. We have got a lot of middle class and low class people here economically--much more than we have upper class. Now, Mississippi State draws from all segments. We are not just poor kids in the state. We have a good deal of wealthy people too. Generally speaking, there is not that many families that have old enough wealth to have forgotten that
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wealth is acquired by hard work. So, I attribute that kind of thing to the people of this state and the students that come here and the expectations that are laid on them. You can go into the arts...our Art program is a wonderful program very very heavily subscribed to by students. But, what kind of art is it? It is computer graphics, and its animation, and its artwork for advertisement, and our art students are not planning to go starve in a _______ somewhere. They are coming here and using a talent to make a living. That is a good example, I think. I wish all the departments on this campus would recognize that. You know, if they want to fit in and prosper in this environment, they need to find a peg to hang their graduates on. Broadcast meteorology--I mean you know. What would the geography and geology department have to brag about if it had not been for one faculty member who said "I am teaching climatology and we got a bunch of people out their practicing climatology that don't know what they are doing." So, we got people coming here to prepare themselves for employment in a particular area. That is not the way I would personally like to see it. I wish that our population could reach the point to where people could look at the four years of undergraduate work as a broadening and maturing experience. Then go to graduate school and prepare for making a living. If I had to do it over again, and I would have loved to have done that. In my family circumstances that just was not even considered. You went to college to do something. I think that is still the reason why most of the students at Mississippi State come to Mississippi State. That is the land-grant concept. The traditional Ivy League university is absolutely indifferent to what kind of jobs its people get. MB: RF: Exactly. I get tickled every time I see the surveys where they show that the graduates of Yale and Harvard and Princeton on the average make more money than the graduates of any other segment. But, then the families of the graduates of Yale, Harvard, and Princeton have enough money for them to live off of and never turn a lick. We don't have many like that that are planning to go back and live off the trust funds. That's really, in my judgement, what keeps Mississippi State going. It's one reason why people come here to employ our graduates. I know that for a fact because I have placed a many a graduate with employment. They say your graduates come to us prepared to work. Now, we did not teach them that [laughter]. We encouraged them, but they came to Mississippi State not looking for a free ride. They came to prepare themselves to do better. That's why I think that long-term, and its going to be a long long time, this racial situation in this state we see now what
I consider to be the cream of the young black youth coming to Mississippi State. They are coming here because they can get something here that they can convert into a better life for themselves. They have no different motivations that anybody else that has ever come here. They come in greater numbers every year. We don't make...you cant talk about it as much. You get accused of being racist. I am so proud of the fact that the second highest number of black majors on this campus is in electrical engineering. The first highest is in education. That is a much broader field and there is a lot more people. I don't know what the count is now, but when I was still working there was seventy-five or eighty, hundred black electrical engineers on this campus. I guarantee you those people will not be worrying about economic activity when they get away from here. MB: RF: MB: No. But, anyway I have enjoyed chatting with you and I could chat a lot longer, but I don't think anybody would want to listen. Well, we sure appreciate it. Well, as this program goes along, and we develop some different areas...subject areas...we may get back with you on some of these others. We will go ahead and close it right here. You want me to read these names of these people? I will just take them down from your list, and that will be fine. I will just leave this note with you... [End Tape 2, Side 1]
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